Steve Jobs heralds the real-time web age

I’m sure that Steve Jobs didn’t want his announcement to be one of the seminal events that ushers in the real-time web age, but what just happened today will be remembered for years to come.

What happened? While CNBC was reporting it on TV the real-time-web was going nuts. Passing along little tidbits. Stories. Links. Rumors. And all that. It was fun, interesting, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

Not so different from the über-addictive Twitter Election Buzz Generator Map during the election. You saw memes and news of events develop real-time.

There were 40 Tweets coming in every three or four seconds on Twitter search. And it stayed up!

See above comment.

Friendfeed was going nuts (that’s where I saw the news first).

While I wrote this post, which only took about a minute or two, 191 new Tweets came in.

I am in obeisance if you can write a good post in 1-2 mins. Should I end it all now?!

But this points to some dangers and problems:

1. If you aren’t online there’s no “warning” system that something is happening. I wish I could tell Twitter to SMS me whenever a “high flow” event is underway.

Awesome idea re: SMS “big trends” alerts. Could close the digital divide a little, but also something that would enfranchise the already-at-least-partially enfranchised.

2. It’s hard to separate out the real facts, from the fiction. I have a better filter than most people. I know who is credible based on past experience with them. Quick, who is more credible, Allen Stern or Ralph Sanders. I am following both and know who Allen is. Ralph? Not so much and I’ve never seen him involved in a breaking news story.

Twitter truly is the wisdom of many; get just 15 tweets on a topic and you have a good read on what’s happening and where it places relative to rumors…and if you choose your followeds well, you get a REALLY good  feed of information analysis the likes of which you can’t get on TV or elsewhere.

Anyway, thank you to Steve Jobs for demonstrating to lots of people that real-time news is indeed important and that blogs are not the only way to go. Now you you understand why I invested so much time in friendfeed and twitter last year.

The thing I got out of the Jobs announcement besides the thought that Apple will be different for either awhile or “going forward” (a phrase born to describe the future after a bad event) is: Steve Jobs gave us just about everything beautiful in computing. His has been and will be a life lived for US. And I hope his days going forward are good.