Finding opportunities

Tim Bray has been analyzing forms of communication. He’s been looking at twitter, mail, IRC, etc. in terms of immediacy, lifespan, and audience. He says, “I’m going to keep fooling with this. You see, if you draw the right graph, maybe you’ll see the gaping hole in it, the Next Big Thing.” He’s got some cool graphs, but I think the new stuff comes from realizing there are axes you didn’t know about. E.g., Flickr suddenly added “sharing” where that category didn’t exist before. Twitter pushed the immediacy axis out a long way. That said, I’d love to be proven wrong …

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