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Posts Tagged ‘Roden’

Case Study: The Real-Time Web at the New York Times & EnjoysThings

This Monday we’re releasing our latest premium research report, entitled The Real-Time Web and Its Future. You can pre-order this in-depth report for just $200.

One of the 50 interviews we conducted was with Ted Roden, a Creative Technologist at The New York Times. In this post, an edited extract from our new report, we explore how Roden works with real-time data at The Times. We also discuss the creative real-time development he’s doing on a side-project called EnjoysThings.

Pre-order now: The Real-Time Web and Its Future, $200 if you order before 30 Nov; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF).

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The primary contributions Ted Roden makes to understanding the real-time web include articulating:

• the material benefits of going real time
• the importance of user experience
• the changing landscape in analytics and advertising

We had a conversation with Roden about what happened after he added a real-time feed to EnjoysThings; he articulates well some of the biggest advantages of a real-time infrastructure.

EnjoysThings is a visual bookmarking site, like Delicious for images and other media. Even text snippets bookmarked are highlighted visually. User experience is a key consideration in all the site’s developments and the service is a lot of fun to use.

This summer Roden added a premium subscription option to the site, called Joy accounts. Joy accounts cost $20 per year for access to all the current and forthcoming premium features, or users can pay $5 for a single premium feature like disabling ads on the site or being able to view NSFW content.

One of the features Joy account holders get is access to a real-time view of new content shared. That real-time stream can be viewed in any browser but may be best served up via a Firefox sidebar. A real-time feed as up-sold value add? That’s remarkable and Roden says the response has been positive.

The sidebar is simple but compelling. New content is pushed live into the side of the browser as soon as it’s shared on the site, including images. At first Roden said he used AJAX set to poll his site every few seconds. Then he switched to a Comet implementation. He says he’s using the open source infrastructure Tornado, from Facebook, for his real-time prototypes at the Times.

EnjoysThings is still very small but the implications of adding real-time to this site could likely be incurred by sites of any size.

1. INCREASED TIME ON SITE

“People leave it open all day long,” Roden said of the sidebar. “Time-on-site has seen a huge increase. It’s like when the new content comes in on the Facebook Live Feed, if you know it’s about to pop in 5 seconds you’ll stick around.”

There are a number of different factors that are making time-on-site an increasingly important metric on the web, compared to pageviews. Increased consumption of video is the best known, but as real-time streams of aggregated content become increasingly
common, increased time-on-site will be an important measurement of how successful an implementation is.

2. DECREASED SERVER COSTS

After implementing real-time infrastructure, Roden reports that “my site runs a lot more
smoothly, I’ll probably move the whole site to that technology because deep down it’s
much easier on the database for me.”

“I used to get hit by Stumbleupon and [the site] would start to crawl. Then I changed to some of this real time stuff and I’ve reduced the number of servers. Instead of the users sitting on the page and refreshing, I push it out to them. My EC2 bill has gone way down.” Roden’s experience compliments the story that Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick told us about using PubSubHubbub push feeds to deliver shared items in Google Reader to FriendFeed. Changing from polling to real-time push cut traffic between the two sites by 85%. Likewise, magazine-style feed reader Feedly says that the part of its service that now consumes PubSubHubbub from Google Reader has seen a 72% reduction in bandwidth.

…(continued) To read the rest of this sample chapter, see the PDF download. You can also check out the Table of Contents and pre-order the full report at a discounted price of $200.

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Three Things to Know About the Real-Time Web Summit (Just 50 Tickets Left at Current Price)

There’s just ten days left until the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. We’ve got an incredible group of people coming together to discuss the broad work being done across the real-time web and the deep consequences of this new way for information to be distributed.

We hope you’ll join us in person, there’s just 50 tickets left at the current price, but if you’re unable to come then please put it down on your calendar to watch the live video stream of selected sessions. Here’s three things you should know about the event.

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There’s a Lot to Talk About

Last week we published a post titled Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action. That collection illustrates the diverse and important ways people are leveraging real time on the web, from leveraging presence data to real-time reputation tracking and pushing financial data in banking. Sunlight Foundation’s Jake Brewer said about that post today, “Congress should study this list.”

There Are Incredible People Coming

People and companies from around the world are coming to the Summit. Here’s a list of highlighted participants. You’ll find the right people if you want to talk to big consumer vendors like Google, Yahoo and MySpace, enterprise startups like Atlassian and Kaazing or innovators like John Borthwick (BusinessWeek calls him “perhaps the real-time Web’s key articulator”), Ted Roden of the NY Times R&D Lab and the artsy social network EnjoysThin.gs or serial-inventor Leah Culver.

Want to talk to people building key protocols? Google’s Brett Slatikin is leading the development of Pubsubhubbub along with Brad Fitzpatrick, who insiders will tell you has been central to the birth of social networking, OpenID and a whole lot more. Both of them will be at the Summit.

There will be marketing people there, engineers, executives, independent innovators. It will be awesome.

The Agenda Will Be Created In Real Time

Convene an incredible group of people, frame the discussion and ask big important questions, then guide participants in building an agenda for the day to maximize value of the event and minimize hot air. That’s the recipe we’re following, with the capable guidance of professional “unconference” facilitator Kaliya Hamlin. Kaliya has been facilitating events like this all around the world for almost 10 years.

Martin Källström, CEO of real-time blog and feed tracking service Twingly is bringing his team over from Sweden for the event. “Last year we happened across one of Kaliya Hamlin’s unconference events,” he told us. “We spent a couple of hours there and it was an amazing experience. I’m really looking forward to the real-time web summit. The unconference format is an amazing way for things to happen, it gets everyone to lower their defenses. By opening peoples’ minds to ‘this is about whatever we want it to be about’, they look at how they can create value.”

Or, as Google’s Brett Slatkin said last week in referencing the format of the elite FooCamp events to explain the Real-Time Web Summit: “Foo-style [unconferencing is] always way better than talks. See ya there!”

Here are some of the questions that early bird registrants said they wanted to explore.

After the event, all participants will also receive a professionally-produced eBook documenting all the conversation sessions that happened, so you’ll be able to get value from sessions you missed to go to another one.

Participants who purchase tickets will also receive a substantial discount on our forthcoming research report on the state of the real-time web market and directions it may go in the future, based on interviews with more than 40 companies building or using these tools.

So what are you waiting for? Go register now, before the current window of ticket pricing closes.

Photo of Kaliya Hamlin by Bill Johnston.

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