This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

“see who else is there with you in each moment”

Isn’t that what the comment box on every site does?

Nope, commenting shows you who was there before you.

There’s a fundamental difference between a web audience and a concert audience: physical proximity. It’s that “right next to a stranger” phenomenon that can’t be reproduced on the web no matter how fast the Internet gets.

Ask any concert coordinator, bar manager, or musician and they’ll tell you that any space that’s big enough to allow people to spread out will kill the vibe and make an entire event or room suck.

You can’t reproduce physical proximity on the web. (yet)

Definitely a good point.

It depends on the web app really. With online games you can see that there are people online with you playing. The thing that is disgusting is that people are so scared of being alone. These days, technology is driving people farther and farther away from each other. It is scary. In time people will be permanently hooked up to the net, of course by that time it will be much more dynamic than it is today (if we get to that point that is) Moores law could get in the way of that for a time being. I think people aught to get away from the computer. Go take a wilderness survival course. Get intouch with physical reality more.

Anil makes an interesting point in his article, and he even offers a partial solution when he talks about Chartbeat, which captures analytics in more of a real-time fashion which can help tell you if there’s a crowd gathering to view your content. But, I think two things are still missing.

1. It doesn’t allow you to show others on the web that a crowd is gathering or how big it is. If this were possible, a good portion of your traffic would be generated simply out of curiosity and crowd following. See the SvN post about Derek Siver’s TED talk for evidence of this.

2. It doesn’t measure the mood of the crowd. At a concert, the audience doesn’t say much in the way of words, but rather works together to convey whether they like or don’t like what they are seeing and hearing. It would be interesting to see whether the crowd is cheering or booing your content.

In this way, the comments become a little more like reviews of the performance after it’s over.

All great points so far, excited to see wheere this goes.

Xaviour, I think Stefana Broadbent would disagree with you entirely. Just because we “feel” like the Internet is driving us apart does not mean it is. Watch her TED talk for more on that thought.

i agree, as the web moves into real time, than there will be collaboration as to who is there with you right now.

here is an article from business insider that discusses what google is doing with the real time web

Google Real Time Web