DISQUS

hardaway · 11 months ago

Well, Louis, you might be talking about two different things. The banks hold on to your cash and don't transfer it instantaneously because they make significant money on the "float," the time they keep your money without sending it to the next guy. I recently had an experience where Wells Fargo put a hold on a check that had been paid to my company for services by a city in the Phoenix metro area. The hold was over a week. I'm what's known as a "high value" customer, and the city is probably good for the money (although one never knows these days, does one). So I can only conclude it's the float.

As for Feedburner, there it seems as if someone is asleep at the switch.

But there's another problem: expectation management. We in the tech community know what's possible, and our expectations are almost impossible to manage. We know that our health records should be electronic, our wire transfers should be immediate, and our blog posts should hit Google Reader as soon as they hit Twitter. I'm not a technologist, but as a humanist I venture to guess we just aren't there yet from a systems point of view.

Natalia Corres · 11 months ago

Most financial institutions make their money on the "float" - i.e. the money made on interest on your money in that time between when you transfer it and when it is "available" in your other account. No matter how good the technology is, I cannot imagine the banking industry would give up that enormous money machine.

Mo Kargas · 11 months ago

I couldn't agree more. There's no excuse for it in 2009 to be brutally honest. So many services who tout web 2.0 really need to pick their game up.

Courtney Engle · 11 months ago

i like the idea of "brutally fun"... as if to say being brutally honest is addictive in a good way. sounds a lot like a hockey game.

Chris Charabaruk for Hire · 11 months ago

I've taken to manually pinging FeedBurner each time I post to my blog. On the other hand, for most services I have linked to FriendFeed, I have to tell it to update each service I use manually, since it seems to take forever (and under the CES traffic crunch, things are only worse).

Louis Gray · 11 months ago

I ping FeedBurner when I post as well, and then refresh the site here manually on FriendFeed to make sure it gets through.

Hutch Carpenter · 11 months ago

That Feedburner experience sounds woeful. Is Scoble's real-time web conference on?

Paola · 11 months ago

Yes I'm all for "The Power of Now". Well actually, that was a book about something else. But still.

Ontario Emperor · 11 months ago

It's not just Feedburner. If I want something to appear in my FriendFeed RIGHT NOW, I almost always have to do a manual refresh, and sometimes even that doesn't work. But an argument can be made that updates to FriendFeed aren't as important as, say, stock trades.

Ontario Emperor · 11 months ago

Louis, I know you're familiar with marketing requirements. So let me ask this question - assuming that one uses FriendFeed for personal purposes, what is the MAXIMUM amount of time to elapse between the time an item is created on some service (Blogger, YouTube, whatever), and the time that item appears on FriendFeed? And, how was this maximum time derived?

Louis Gray · 11 months ago

Ontario? The maximum acceptable time? For Twitter, no delay. Blog posts... almost no delay. But I'd assume Flickr, Smugmug and other less-instant items could wait minutes. Disqus comments for instance are very fast now and don't need to get any quicker, in my opinion. The #1 issue I have with Smugmug right now is that it actually syncs "too fast", meaning the first rev of comments and likes tends to get wiped out when the set of photos is final. FriendFeed does a good job now, but the bar is very high.

Ontario Emperor · 11 months ago

There's part of me that wants everything to appear within 1 minute. But do I need it?

I can argue that ANYTHING - blog post, tweet, Disqus comment, Flickr picture, YouTube video, last.fm song, whatever - can spark a conversation, so can one argue that some types of items are less critical?

Jason Kaneshiro · 11 months ago

I'm pretty sure financial companies have the delay not because they're behind the times technology wise -but because they stand to make a mint in late fees an interest holding on to money even for an extra day. Every credit card I pay online charges an extra fee for "right now" bill pay. Otherwise it's wait at least 1 business day

sidburgess · 11 months ago

I just wish I knew how you felt!
Lol, I agree. Actually today I sold a website, they paid with PayPal. Great, but now I have to wait another 4 days to get my money. I agree, it seems silly in today's digital world to have to wait.

Lee Bautista · 11 months ago

"simplicity of the web" is not the problem. the problem revolves around people and process. come on. don't blame the internet. there's much more going on behind the scenes of *any* business; be it regulation, process, cost, infrastructure ... if that's what you meant, you didn't say it.

ChangeForge | Ken Stewart · 11 months ago

I have to think this will get better, but I also know it won't be quickly. Banks make money by holding yours - is my belief. Nice article on the fact that many things that have been technology enabled still have a long way to go.

Tyler Sid · 11 months ago

It really depends on the mindset at the people at those institutions...people at banks are usually behind the curve and Google has gotten so bloated...

gregorylent · 11 months ago

am fairly sure waiting is here to stay ...

Mathew A. Koeneker · 11 months ago

The interest earned on "credit floats" are amazing not that anyone would do that or anything. In terms of the stock market, there are specific SEC guidelines dealing with a lot of the maneuverings that you mentioned.

andy brudtkuhl · 11 months ago

Feedburner sucks. I've said it before - someone needs to come in and take back this market while feedburner is blowing it.. there's a huge market opportunity there. (sorry a tad off topic)

Susanne "Renee" Bullo · 11 months ago

At this particular point in time, I'd just be happy if Twitter would get back to working properly and not dropping my tweets. Once yesterday and once today. Grrrrr. I'm not asking for instantaneous - just asking for it to actually happen at some point.

Tutivillus Grift · 11 months ago

The MacClusterF seems to have damaged Twitter. Of course, in reality, it's probably their PATHETIC security.

Kristian Luoma · 11 months ago

I'm with you.

Real-time web is just around the corner.. it has been waiting to happen for a very long time. To me it's been pending due to the mindset of how we build stuff in the web. Things like RSS, REST APIs, etc. just take us to the opposite direction from what real-time web is supposed to be like.

You want "real" real-time? Related to this, I saw recently an interesting presentation about this topic and how we could choose different tools for making it happen more effectively ("beyond RESTful", http://www.slideshare.net/kellan/beyond-rest). In short, the argument of the presentation (by a guy working for Flickr I think) was that instant messaging technology "exploits" would deliver the speed and scalability we need for real-time web revolution. I think so too. I also believe XMPP, as an open technology, is the vehicle to take us there.

As an example of this, I'm using FriendFeed with my Nokia Chat (go check it out from Nokia Betalabs). FriendFeed aggregates nicely all the social network updates (or other RSS feeds for that matter) over IM to my mobile. I can also update my status and comment back via the IM channel. Just imagine what we can do if we'd have a dedicated UI for the experience, and just use the real-time communications (like Nokia Chat) as basis of all of this.

Anyway my two cents is that we just need to pick the right ingredients to build the solution and I think the web of flow, as some call it, is on its way.

Mike Rivera · 11 months ago

The frustration I had with delayed money transfers between Etrade and Wells Fargo motivated me to quit Etrade altogether. One lost customer.

The idea that @Natalia Corres brings up really motivates me to quit. I'm doing you a favor by using your service and making you money through trading fees, but apparently that's not enough. You also have to skim a little more at my expense. Well, no longer. Bye bye Etrade.

Ed Richardson · 11 months ago

The banking institutions inability to transfer cash any quicker than the time it would take for me to travel to the recipients place of work and deliver the cash myself has been an issue I have grumbled over for years.

The UK banking infrastructure has just reduced this time to clear cheques (I much prefer the UK spelling :-p) just as they are going into extinction.

But these after all are ancient (in online terms) institutions, online web services such as stat facilities and Feedburner do not have the same excuse.

I'd recommend GetClicky, I started using them last year and was impressed, but still haven't got round to subscribing to a premium account.

There is still a place I believe for RSS in this Real Time Web world, but we need to keep the services efficient.

Dominic/IRWebReport · 11 months ago

Sorry I couldn't comment earlier, but my life has not been real-time lately. :)

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

THis is a great topic and something I think about too Louis. Even my beloved Twitter isn't really "real time," due to caching rules or simple latency.

c wylie · 11 months ago

I have only once non-recurring site that sometimes gets to me: Twitter. Having to refresh twitter is rediculous, but I assume that is more of a challenge to pull off b/c everyone's individual stream is different. Hopefully 2009 will be the year more people program with live refreshing in mind, myself being a webdesigner, included.

Ben Stock of Brainpower · 11 months ago

I love the unsubscribe forms from commercial email sites that tell you your name will be removed from the database in a matter of weeks. Pharaoh was faster. So it shall be written so it shall be done.