Monthly Archives: May 2009

For whom the Google tolls

It’s amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood. At the company’s Zeitgeist conference in London yesterday, cofounder Larry Page warned that privacy-protecting restrictions on Google’s ability to store personal data were hindering the company from tracking the spread of diseases and hence increasing the risk of mankind’s extinction. The less data Google is allowed to store, said Page, the “more likely we all are to die.” (This is a particularly sensitive issue for Page, as he’s a big backer of the Singularitarians’ attempts to secure human immortality.)

I couldn’t help but be reminded of how, back in 2001, Google saved the life of that fellow who was about to suffer a heart attack. The guy was having chest pains, and he went to the Web to seek medical advice. The first search engine he tried – not Google’s – got bogged down by serving up graphical banner ads. So he switched to Google, which only served text ads, and in a snap discovered he should take aspirin and go to a hospital. “Not only did our search engine save his life,” said Sergey Brin, the other, equally humble cofounder, “but it shows that these decisions – like whether to use text-based or graphical ads – matter.”

In 2005, Google announced that it would begin running graphical ads to increase its revenues. By that time, most people had broadband connections and, for them, loading graphical ads was no longer quite so much of a life-threatening ordeal. And what of the millions of people who continued to rely on pokey dial-up connections? Google ran the numbers, I suppose, and calculated that they were dispensable.

The New York Real Times

Twitterification continues. Not only are other social networking sites, such as Facebook, scrambling to pour their members’ energy into the realtime stream, but more traditional publishers are also adopting the Twitter model to firehose their content. Build your arks, my friends: The stream is going mainstream.

Yesterday, it was the New York Times that took the realtime plunge with the launch of Times Wire, a jittery twittery service that the paper describes as “a continuously updated stream of the latest stories and blog posts.” The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out. Times Wire doesn’t just give the Gray Lady a facelift; it jabs an IV into the ashen flesh of her forearm and hooks her up to a Red Bull drip bag. It’s Times Wired.

This isn’t the first appearance of Times Wire. The original was installed next to the death bed of former president Woodrow Wilson on February 1, 1924, as the Times reported in a story headlined “Times Wire Near Bedside”:

Special facilities to transmit the news from former President Wilson’s bedside were installed by The New York Times early this evening. A telephone wire was connected with The Times Washington Bureau in the Albee Building and temporary headquarters half a block from the Wilson home in S Street. A Morse instrument was attached to this wire and every change in Mr. Wilson’s condition was instantly flashed to the Washington Bureau and then transmitted over leased wires to the New York office of The Times, giving the most expeditious service.

That’s right: Woodrow Wilson, though he surely didn’t realize it at the time, was the world’s first Twitterer.

woodrow: Still dying.

Now every story gets the ailing president treatment. Not only is all the news fit to stream, but realtime renders all news equal.

But there’s real realtime and there’s faux realtime, and it remains to be seen whether the Times will prove streamworthy. Techcrunch worries that the paper’s “real-time river isn’t flowing fast enough.” After all, “by the time an old media site gets a story approved, written and edited, a dozen blogs probably have already covered the same news.” Times Wire offers “some interesting reads,” but “none are particularly new.”

Realtime is a harsh mistress. She wants everything, from androgynous 80s pop stars to terminally ill world leaders, and she wants it now.

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here.