Realtime. Dynamic Privacy. The social graph. If cool-sounding terms that mean relatively little were business models, we could have saved Web 2.0!

Look, there is some very real world-changing stuff going on in the primordial soup of social networking and micropublishing. Stuff that will affect how we work, play, and communicate for the rest of time. But it's not as complicated as people seem to need to make it. Just fresh from a run during which I listened to the talking heads on the Gilmour Gang overcomplicate things unnecessarily, I decided I'd had enough, that it was time for a simple explanation (perhaps more for me than for anyone else!). In case you feel that way too, here goes...

All of this stuff can be traced back to the instinctive need for the social animal to communicate. As a species we do better when we communicate, so we are hard wired to do it as much as we can. The revolution in electronic communications, namely email, took this to a whole new level with anyone being able to send anything to anyone in the world instantaneously. I was part of the first generation of people to go to work as corporate America was rolling out cross-company open email to desktops, and let me tell you it was an awesome thing to watch. Not so much for the folks like me who had had it in college, but definitely to the people that were coming from the closed Microsoft Mail and Lotus Notes systems and still depended on fax/Fedex/peons like me to get stuff to the partner/client/whoever.

And for the record, IM was only synchronous email, nothing more. All of the sociologists and cultural anthropologists who claim that it encourages more informal means of communicating have never seen two corporate drones flirting over a Blackberry-empowered network (I'll get back to how realtime is just an implementation detail in a moment, but the first time we saw it hailed as something different was in the email/IM faux distinction which is why I mention it here).

After the first dot-com collapse, there emerged this cool little standard called RSS for the syndication of published content. Anyone anywhere could author content and publish it— not as an email newsletter (which used to be popular if you remember) where you had to know, beg, borrow, or steal the exact list of recipients, but to the world who could then "pull" that content from you by subscribing to your stream of published items. It was a fantastic idea mostly because it provided a layer of indirection between writer and reader that was sorely missing from mediums like email and IM.

The problem: RSS never took off. It was too cumbersome to set up, explain, discover, and understand relative to the existing alternatives. I personally gave up evangelizing it to regular folks after years of getting "yeah, but why wouldn't I just go to the site?!?" and seeing that despite folks like Google (Reader) and FeedDemon (the thing in Outlook) getting the consuming implementation right, it just wasn't taking off.

Imagine my surprise then upon discovering that Twitter— an SMS app-turned-micropublishing service— has now evolved into RSS for the mainstream. Like many other people, I hate trying to follow conversations on Twitter— they most definitely feel like listening to half of an interesting conversation, or worse yet 1/25th of one— but I do love the quality of the links that I get from the dot-product of the people that I follow. I'm already a Google Reader convert but on weeks when I accumulate 4500+ items to go through, I find that Shift-A (the keyboard command to wipe them all away) is much easier to embrace because I've got a Twitter feed of content to summarize it all.

So, to repeat: what does Twitter give me? A layer of indirection between the people who are communicating interesting things with the world and me so that they can send great stuff my way without knowing or caring about who I am. This is powerful stuff because it allows me to take control of a torrent of communications that I find incredibly valuable but which I wouldn't be exposed to if I were just to have stuck to my parochial little address book. RSS publish-and-subscribe did it first, and arguably in a richer more open way, but it has turned out to be Betamax to Twitter's VHS.

What about all of those that claim that Twitter is "realtime" while everything else before it is not? Again, an implementation detail just like email and IM. There is no reason why RSS readers can not poll aggressively enough to simulate realtime especially in a world of distributed blogs where one service doesn't have to take all of the load. Google can (and is) updating selective parts of its index in close to realtime as well. Culturally, Twitter tries to enforce a difference with the 140 character limit (to borrow from evolution, an exaptation that came from the service's original desire to blend SMS and the web), but in reality there are plenty of valuable blogs that provide little more than title and link with each entry so that seems like a thin distinction.

Now, to close on Facebook. Unlike the one-way subscribe/follow relationship of Twitter, Facebook's roots come more from the standard addressbook/buddy list where relationships are bi-directionally approved. Friending is no different than adding someone to your buddy list in that it implies that you are now also in theirs except for the fact that the act is the used to filter a steady stream of communications on your behalf. The folks at Facebook are geniuses at doing this well once the relationship is established— both by rolling out a steady stream of really useful but lightweight applications (Photos for instance) and by encouraging "social signaling" behaviors (relationship status anyone?) on the part of their users that increase the volume of communication.

But where Facebook really hopes to innovate, and has in fact started to already, is in the process of discovering new bi-directional relationships on your behalf by stuff that can be as simple as exposing you to friends of your friends or finding your old school mates, and as complex as trying to match your "profile" with other people you might like.

Before the social networking craze of 2000+, there were many startups that died on the vine trying to tackle the more complex methods of forming new relationships automatically (Abuzz, Visible Path, etc.). All of these companies failed because they overthought the problem (certainly compared to Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook), but they were dead on about the fact that the evolution of the address book requires automatic updating with valuable contacts you may not yet know being added by using the power of electronic communications and good software.

I think that both of these innovations, the taking of publish/subscribe that RSS introduced into the mainstream and the growing of the dynamic address book are eventually going to be as big as email or the web itself. They will have to become open standards to truly thrive, and it will be tricky to find sustainable business models for all but the largest players (who can just monetize the eyeballs), but they are here to stay as permanent fixtures in the evolution of how we communicate.

The most important thing to keep in mind though is that both of these companies are playing on a continuum and not doing something that is so fundamentally new that we should go around inventing buzzwords and claiming we can not yet understand it. Jeff Bezos, while on Charlie Rose to pimp the new Kindle, told Charlie that the important thing to realize in technology companies taking the long view is that while the technology itself may change quickly, the core underlying customer need doesn't, and in fact tends to evolve slowly. We ought to keep this in mind when we consider all of these new communication platforms.