The story so far: The Now-New-Near Web is the incremental Web in Time, Topics and Space. It is a web which is made by us with our mobiles, using rich media, and is a mirror image of the real world about us. This can be summarised as the N3 Web built around M4 (me, mobiles, media, mirror world).
Let us take each of the three terms now, new, and near and delve into them in the context of the incremental content.
Now is about incremental in Time. It is about events that are happening now. Other words to describe this web are real-time and live. The World of Now is the world around us. Watching a cricket match on TV or a business channel with its constant updates of stock indices and prices is a view on whats happening now. As Ryan Stewart wrote on ZDNet: The world works in real time. Stock quotes, conversations, events, all of it is in real time, and the web shouldn’t be any different. Being able to experience that event in real time is something that could be a huge draw for users. Why do people pay so much money to go to a sporting event or to a concert? Because of the experience. They’re surrounded by fans, they’re seeing everything with their own eyes and therefore creating their own perceptions.
Time has been a key aspect of our lives for as long as we can remember. History is organised along timelines. We think of key events in our lives via dates. 9/11 has been ingrained into the worlds memory as a defining moment of our lives based on the events that took place this day five years ago. In Mumbai, over the past year, two dates have been etched into peoples memories 7/26 and 7/11. The first date refers to the day Mumbai received over 900 mm of rain in 2005, and the second date refers to the bomb blasts which took place in the city recently.
Time is an organising aspect for our lives. So far, the view that we have had into our days has been via the calendar. The calendar compartmentalises time and links them with an activity. Our mobiles phones also have calendars built into them making it that much easier for us to make use of the calendar on a continuous basis.
In the enterprise context, the Now Web can be thought of as the ability to get real-time updates from business applications for decision-making. In the consumer context, the Now Web can be thought of as being able to get a view of what Ramesh Jain (with whom I have co-founded Seraja) has called the EventWeb. Over the next few columns, we will delve into the EventWeb in more detail with a series Ramesh Jain has been writing on his blog.
Tomorrow: EventWeb
TECH TALK The Now-New-Near Web+T
