Much these days is being written, (re)tweeted, posted and discussed about the crop of new services that make the first iteration of what's being called the Realtime Web possible.  Dealing primarily with search, a crop of enterprising platforms spearheaded by Collecta, Taptu and Google rapidly deliver a user experience that is unique: being able to see information literally within seconds of it being published online.

So while as a developer I salivate at the prospect of being able to harness new emerging platforms and the forthcoming generation of abstract frameworks that will empower me to write my own systems centering on an instantaneous feedback loop, the marketer in me wonders how I can exploit such technologies into valuable commodities.  But those concerns are trumped, perhaps more importantly, by the journalist side of my persona as I question the future of media as we know it.

I'm dubbing this balance "The Realtime Paradigm": the symmetry between those who generate content and those who receive it over a rapid-response delivery channel.

The predication central to making a Web that includes discovery of new information, sans latency, is brevity.  The delicate synergy between content creator and content consumer relies on the pace of the former's ability to generate data and the latter's ability to take it in.  Obviously with the overwhelmingly exponential expansion of the 'Net's major social networks, the demand for knowledge is insatiable.  

It's unfathomable to think that even infinitely resourceful organizations like the mighty CNN would be able to crank out multiple 900-word essays and articles fast enough to satisfy the online audience's appetite.  Likewise, most people don't have neither the time nor desire to read a collection of aggregated feature-length compositions. It's too much work.  This also technologically enables more mobile adoption of platforms, working within the confines of screen and bandwidth limitations for handsets and smartphones.

So the next step becomes the impact on traditional media products - a regressive extension, if you will.  How will print media (already in the final stages of its own death throes), radio, television and even existing online platforms adopt this hyperaccelerated production cycle?  But before skipping merrily down that path, consider the shifts towards more condensed packaging that mass media has already seen.

You almost never see a double-feature movie anymore.  Several of Cartoon Network's shows in its Adult Swim programming block are only 11 minutes long.  The FX network features 3-minute recaps of that week's episode of its drama series after they've aired.  Songs on the Top 40 chart are getting shorter.  The average story in a newscast isn't as long as it used to be. Talk radio programs aren't as long as they used to be. Magazines have become more terse with their offerings.  

Clearly, consumer behavior has driven us into the Age of the Short Attention Span; those tasked with developing the information they rely on have to react accordingly if they are to leverage The Realtime Paradigm.

From a content creation standpoint, Twitter has been pretty revolutionary in (de)volving the way we've become accustomed to communicating.  I've said many times over the last year that as a professional broadcaster, anything I write now longer than the canonical 140 characters seems like an epic.  And this is, and will be, key to how realtime systems flourish.  We can keep our stuff of high quality, but in so doing make our material shorter and punchier, delivered in tasty bite-size morsels.

Media's not going flaccid by getting more condensed. It's getting more valuable.  Consider this: it took me 20 minutes to write and post this piece, where I could have generated 10 tweets.  You've made it this far, but Which would you have preferred?

So keep this in mind as we head in 2010 and the Realtime Web continues to take off.  The popular 'Net-lexical acronym "KISS" may be in need of revision, from hereon to be understood as "keep it short, stupid".  ;)