Small World Experience

Every now and then technology works. It's wild when it does. I had such an experience yesterday that made me realize how small the world has become. None of below is remotely close to mainstream (I need to do another blog post on technologies we "think" are mainstream, but are far from it, e.g. RSS), but it was an amazing experience.

A colleague, Kevin Marks, was sitting in a conference (BearHugCamp) that he thought Gnip (either Eric or I) should be attending. He emailed Eric saying as much, and Eric forwarded the mail to me. Within the email was a link to the live webcast being hosted on twit.tv. I clicked the link, click-ed the video into full-screen mode, and I... was... there. Within 60 seconds of Kevin making the suggestion, Gnip was "there." The content was indeed totally relevant, and I had the sense I was "attending" a conference taking place in another state. I gleaned enough to find value, and I moved on.

Not much to the story, but it made me realize just how far live video feeds have come. Latency isn't much of an issue anymore, quality is high, and full-screen is supported by every player now.

The machine is evolving.