My new article for Forbes covering the real-time web is out this morning here:

There is a lot of fuss and confusion over the term “real-time Web” epitomized in this recent comment on O’Reilly Radar:

“I’ve been baffled about all the hype surrounding the ‘real-time Web’ in the past few months. Other than breaking news (which I already had no trouble finding online) I don’t see why everyone is excited about searching real-time content.”

To answer the question, real time is a big deal and it goes way beyond searching content on Twitter. Here’s why:

But real time has the most compelling possibilities for human interaction. Humans operate in real time–we receive information, process it and react in real time. Slowly our entire media and communications infrastructure–what Marshall McLuhan called “The Extensions of Man”–are moving into real time. On the Web this is most commonly understood through services like Twitter or Facebook where communications with your friends and their status updates flow as a constant, up-to-the-second feed. But that is just the beginning. The real-time Web is being used to coordinate group action as it happens–from protest actions in Tehran to Moldavia to California. As a consequence, the next decade will be defined by the rights and regulations surrounding privacy, anonymity, free speech and the right to electronically assemble–as citizens flock to the Internet as a means of promoting civil change.

Real-time systems also help to build social bonds and accelerate knowledge sharing. The power of Twitter goes beyond the information that flows through it, or the fact that it serves as an effective channel for “breaking news.” Twitter’s power lies in the fact that it helps broker social connections. As John Hagel, the renowned business and technology strategist, points out: In times of rapid change the type of knowledge that is valuable shifts from explicit (what can be contained in a document) to tacit (what is contained in a person). The promise of knowledge management lies in connecting people with other people, not with documents. Real-time communication flows will play an increasing role in making sure the questions find the right person (as opposed to the right document) and that we are in a continual state of connectivity.

Real-time testing feedback loops also put a premium on building a learning organization. Winners, on the Web and off, will be dynamically testing and improving closer to real time. Another way to think about this is to consider how Google would run your business–where every user action is used to provide a better service to the next customer. Considering the actions of your users as implicit feedback to continually refine your service is the heart of Web 2.0. It is also the future of being competitive in business.

With the rise of real time we are moving from lagging indicators (customer surveys, focus groups, long product cycles) to leading indicators (online analytics, real-time optimization, lean start-up methods for business). The lag time between question-and-answer and between customer response and company reaction is the arbitrage opportunity for many businesses today.

If the ’90s metaphor for the Internet was “the brain”–a giant, storage and processing system for all the world’s information–the new metaphor is the Social Nervous System, where all of this information is bound up with ubiquitous, real-time communications and used to direct activity in the world. In the Social Nervous System, the boundaries between online and offline become extremely blurry.

We are just scraping the surface of a real-time revolution–but make no mistake, it is a big deal. That is breaking news.

This is a cross-post from my recent article in Forbes:

I often hear executives struggling to understand the power and promise of mobile devices as it relates to their business. “I would never want to receive an ad on my phone for nearby pizza,” they say. Or, “The iPhone is a small percentage of the phone market. What does it have to do with my business?” This is a bit like looking at the emergence of the railroads in the 1800s and saying, “I have no interest in going to Chicago. What’s the big deal?”

Here are a few ways in which mobility matters:

With mobility, coordination replaces planning. As communications protocols accelerate to real-time (think Twitter) we are seeing more work processes move to approaches that favor just-in-time coordination over advanced planning. It is more efficient and more flexible. In software development, this is called the Agile approach where developers code in short, iterative loops, constantly processing the feedback to refine the end product. In product development, this is Fast Cycle Time. In organizational design, this is real-time collaboration and the flattened organization. In the Army, mobile communications are reconfiguring the traditional command-and-control hierarchy, pushing decision-making to the soldier in the field who has the most information about the situation at hand. The implications go beyond military maneuvers. With a workforce able to remain in real-time contact anywhere, possibilities emerge for new management techniques and an increased role for employees.

As we find ourselves tied to mobile devices, coordination will increasingly become the organizing principle that defines how we get work done; we will become a network of spontaneous gathering, loosely coordinated agents in constant contact.

Mobility is not about phones and it is not about computers. Most of us don’t consider how much sensing intelligence is packed into a smart phone. The iPhone is a rich portable computer with on-board sensors capable of gathering huge volumes of data. Specifically, it is a location-aware (GPS), motion-aware (accelerometer), directionally aware (compass) visually aware (camera that can gather visual input of the immediate environment), sonically aware (microphone and speakers), always-connected (wireless or 3Gs) handheld computer. In short, the iPhone does a whole lot more than display information. It is an environmental sensor.

This is an enormous leap forward when our devices are not only connected but actively accepting input from the world around them. We can track our own behavior, monitor our own health and get things done together (e.g., crowdsource maps of our neighborhood). At the far end of the spectrum, the iPhone is being used as a medical diagnostic tool. Doctors without borders, indeed.

Meet your new laptop. Apple has not only opened a programming interface that allows developers to create applications that reside on the iPhone, the company has recently opened up the hardware interface. This means that, soon, attaching a keyboard and screen (among other things) to your iPhone literally will be a snap.

The staggering increase in processing and storage capacity per-square-inch, allied with the development of flexible OLED screens and palm-sized projectors, will allow our mobile devices to do more than our PCs. The mobile device is headed to dethrone the laptop as the de facto standard gear for knowledge work.

The new marketplace here, there and everywhere. Much of the future of commerce will lie in micropayments made at the exact moment of impulse or need–from music to subway tickets and so on. Smart phones now have bar code and QR code readers that allow the phone to act as a scanner (to find the exact product), research assistant (find the best price online, check product ratings) and shopping agent (buy the product on the spot). If you are a retailer, you are now facing a customer with more choices, information and bargaining power than ever before. You will need to rethink your value beyond simply carrying inventory.

In the developing world, where technology constraints often inspire innovation, people are forming alternative currencies, mainly in the form of sharable minutes on their mobile devices. This means, for example, that I can transfer 10 minutes of talk time to your phone in exchange for something of equivalent value–say, a spare part or carton of milk. The most basic peer-to-peer exchange of funds has already gone mobile in certain parts of the developing world.

Getting things done. Mobility is about how your customers are increasingly getting things done–from shopping to reading to wayfinding. Understanding how mobility will change your customer is key to understanding how you will stay relevant.

If you are a product manager, or in R&D, what can the iPhone teach you about product design? What can mobility developments in Africa teach you about constraint-based innovation? If you are in marketing or customer service, what can your younger employees teach you about your next customer? Consider doing a bit of reverse mentoring and prepare to be stunned.

If you are a senior executive, ask yourself how you plan to handle the management challenges as your workforce gets even more disconnected from workplace.

Staying informed about the incredible work occurring at the margins is one of the keys to getting to the future first. Don’t write it off. Embrace the big idea. If you want to talk about it, call me on my mobile. It knows where to find me.

I recently began experimenting with a new web publishing service called Posterous.   I love it.  Here is why:

Posterous begins with something nearly everyone knows how to do (email) and uses that as the basis for web publishing.   Just address your email to post@posterous.com and Posterous does the rest – it creates your account using your unique email address (no more long registration forms), it formats your blog post (subject title is the blog post title – body copy and contents are the post itself).   It carries some very intuitive business logic that works for 90% of the blogs you want to post — for instance when you attach photos it automatically creates a photo gallery.  Include a YouTube link and Posterous embeds the video into your blog for you – and so on.

I don’t think that these modifications are small improvements -  By dramatically lowering the barrier to publishing, (if you know how to email you know how to post to the web) there will likely be a whole new group that becomes active.  To understand my point just look back at the blogging phenomenon itself.

Blogs didn’t create anything new – they made an old activity (publishing to the web) easier.    That change, or more precisely, lowering the “cost” of publishing in terms of effort and barriers to participation  is HUGE.    Posterous  will be successful because it makes web publishing even easier than traditional blogging.

It has also been interesting to see how this change of method creates a change in nomenclature.  Most people I have met who deal with Posterous do not refer to what they are doing as blogging (just as bloggers needed a new name for their activity despite the fact that it wasn’t new either) they talk about posting to “My Posterous” or other variations.   When you change the way people do an old activity – that old activity gets a new name.

Posterous holds a lesson about innovation as well. If you were to have asked me and, I believe, many others, if there were room for another contender in the personal web publishing space I would have said, not really — it is a crowded, and well-advanced market.   I would have been wrong.   Posterous went back to the drawing board on nearly every process – from registration to publishing process.  They cut away all the feature creep that makes other products attractive for more advanced users but add  useless clutter for the vast majority.   There is always room to rethink the way we approach our business models and our business processes.   This is the big and inspiring lesson I draw from Posterous.

“We know what we do.  We know why we do what we do.  What we don’t know is what what we do does” – Michel Foucualt*

@lucatoledo reminded me that it is the 25th anniversary of French Philosopher Michel Foucault’s death.  I have been sitting on this short post that was originally going to cap my series on The Digital Panopticon.   So, on the occassion, and a bit unpolished, here it is.

Discussions about technology largely focus on immediate utility.  They rarely address the larger effect that technology might have on the individual and society.   So it goes with the social media phenomenon – we are absorbed in very granular discussions of use (what it is, why it matters for commerce and how to gain advantage from it) and abuse (Twitter addiction leads to the break up of  Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer etc.) while a much larger drama is unfolding as a consequence of these technologies – the changing notions of identity, society and government.

We need to get better at figuring out “what what we do does”.   What are the consequences of living in a totally networked society?   What will be the new equilibrium we reach on identity, privacy rights, work-life boundaries etc?
The Social Nervous System we are building makes it possible to create a smarter world.   From sensor based infrastructure management like the smart grid, to deep text mining  to assess market sentiment (what the cloud of conversations means for your company) and the social graph.  But  smarter is not necessarily better.   Better is a blend of technology with foresight and ethics.

As I have written before, “It is very possible that just as the development of the neuron enabled a proliferation of new, sophisticated life forms we are developing the next equivalent, the social neuron that binds us into a new, larger social organism.”   I believe the Social Nervous System spells profound and protracted changes to every aspect of society, economy and government.  We should be asking questions that live up to the scope of the change we see around us.   We should not limit this conversation to academia.  This conversation should be social (pun intended).

This is my biggest argument around social media commentary– there is not enough critical questioning – it is one giant echochamber of early adopters focusing on a narrow set of issues – New marketing, new PR, or better business as usual…  Most of those talking (myself included) are also making a living doing the talking so the deck is a bit stacked (see – The Evangelist Fallacy for more on this).
At bottom, no one is quite sure of where things will shake out – what the benefits and consequences will be.  While I am generally optimistic (see Why Business Needs to Get Social) I am aware that the theory of things (what I believe a thing is for) often misses the effect those things have in the world… We should always have one eye on “what what we do does” for therein lies the true significance of any technology or institution.

In the meantime you can catch me giving it up on the Social Web (@jmichele)…

(Image from @schuschny’s blog post on Foucault)

Today Ken Majer – change-agent and leadership guru to many large corporations -  asked for my opinion on why Twitter was receiving so much attention – how much of it is well deserved, how much PR hype.   While the new media aspect of what is happening in Iran has been well covered and I generally avoid current events, I thougt I would share my response here.

The chatter about Twitter is well deserved and a core example of what I have been calling The Social Nervous System - a system that uses Internet communication technology to coordinate events in the real world.   Twitter is a decentralized messaging system with an incredibly low barrier to entry in terms of ease of use and single-purpose functionality…  Each of these factors help explain its  rapid growth as a tool for socializing and answering its default question “What are you Doing?”   Twitter reached its watershed moment during the Mumbai attacks last November when the answer to  “what are you doing” became urgent and important news.    it was used as a real-time news service and was running 10 minutes ahead of CNN….    Its utility as real time news during a breaking situation is what is driving the press now… not PR.   Iranians on both sides have been using it to push information out… Since it is decentralized you are not dealing with the leadership of these factions but actual citizens engaged in struggle….   That direct, emotional, on-the-ground connection in combination with the real-time nature of the story as it unfolds is truly compelling.

Let me break down these elements individually.

Twitter is Single Purpose - Twitter only really tries to do one thing – a simple, character-constrained messaging service.   It asks one question, “what are you doing?”  It provides you one window in which to enter your text and one button to publish.   This single purpose design creates two critical side effects:  1. It lowers the barrier to entry and is incredibly easy to use. 2. it creates myriad opportunities for others to build on top of (see Platforms beat Applications) – Currently I believe there are over 2000 services that help you manage your Twitter presence.  For example,  I use Tweetdeck to aggregate and publish Tweets,  bitly as my URL shortener, MrTweet to find people I might be interested in and Twitterific as my iPhone client.    A radically simple tool for socializing explains how Twitter got liftoff – but not why it is being used in situations like Iran….For that you need to consider that…

Twitter is Decentralized – Anyone can create a Twitter account.  Tweets can be authored, published or consumed easily  from laptops or mobile devices.  Twitter is a radically democratic medium allowing anyone, anywhere to connect.

Twitter is Direct - When you search on Twitter, or follow – you are hearing directly from a human being.  There is no PR layer (usually).  In Iran this means that you are hearing directly from people in the street.  This direct, human connection is powerful.

Twitter is Real Time - Twitter runs in real time.  When you search Twitter it is all about now.   The enforced brevity of 140 characters further accelerates the speed of communication.  These are dispatches with a lag time of seconds – not even hours.

Twitter Allows Asymmetric relationships (or Twitter Works Like a Populist News Service) : Unlike Facebook – you can follow anyone you like (unless they have protected their profile – which very few ppl do).  This means that Twitter can replicate the way influence works in society  — meaning, human attention can be directed to whatever person “earns” that attention.  That attention doesn’t “cost” the influencer anything because Twitter is asymmetric — you can follow me — I don’t need to follow you if I do not choose to.  I don’t even need to know who you are….  In this regard it is more like a broadcast tool.    This asymmetric property also accelerates the diffusion of information since there is much more cross-pollination of followers/followed than in a more symmetric model like Facebook where both parties must agree to be friends…. All of this to say – Twitter is structured to be function better as a new service than other social technologies.

Twitter is now part of  the revolutionary’s toolkit just as Mumbai made it  a part of the emergency response toolkit.  What happens next is anyone’s guess.

During my study of classical Chinese it would take hours of contemplation to really get to the root of a poem.   That was the point.  It was a meditation proposed by the poet for consideration by the reader.  As with philosophy, poetry is a time-intensive practice that requires deep focus and concentration.   Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and the host of real-time-web feed services belong on the opposite side of the spectrum.  They are quintessentially distraction-based media;  shallow on context and truncated into staccato bursts of conversation…  These media play off of a very real psychological factor known as operant conditioning, the addictive need to return over and over in hopes of a reward (a great link from Scoble perhaps?)…

The dominant revenue model of the web today – the ad that urges a click -  embeds distraction into interface design.   The more clicks you take – the more Google makes in ad revenue (distraction pays).   This is not to say that social media doesn’t have extraordinary value – it does – It is at  the heart the emerging social nervous system.   Yet,   The ability to pay attention, focus and strategically disconnect will be a winning discipline of the next generation of business leaders.  As the zen phrase says, “eat when you eat” meaning, give each thing you do all of your attention.  You will be rewarded from it.    Lately I have been getting back to pen and paper brainstorming.   Away from the computer.