Robert Scoble talks about the real-time web and Rackspace

So we are here with Robert Scoble now with Rackspace. And Robert, congratulations on the new gig.

Thank you so much. And thanks for telling me a little.

Bit about your new project. Building 43, right?

Yeah. Building43.com is a place, a community on the Internet for people who are fanatical about the Internet. So we're going to be teaching people, especially businesses, how the web is evolving and show them examples, you know, sites and techniques and tips. We're going to be doing a lot of Q and A kind of stuff and how to videos, that kind of.

Thing is it for a small business?

Big business, everybody. I mean, Rackspace hosts so many of the world's best websites that we're going to get around and get a lot of those on video where you can watch and see the designer and understand what they learned while they did their website.

Very cool. And I think, you know, businesses need this help, especially with the evolving web. I mean, websites are changing.

No. And they're becoming more social. Right. You're seeing companies like Zappos really get remarkable results by having a community of employees out on Twitter, for example. Most businesses have no clue what Twitter is.

Exactly.

They don't even.

Yeah, they're way behind it. So I think this will be a great resource where they can go in and learn about how to make it make sense for their business too.

Absolutely.

Nice. So one of the, you know, speaking of Twitter and how Zappos uses it and this idea of the real time web information just coming at you so fast, faster than Google can grab it and index it and produce it. There's been a lot of talk about that this week at South By. That's where we are with the Rackspace party. Where are we going in the next six months and then 18 months?

The amount of content that's being generated is just going to keep going up. More YouTube videos, more blogs, more tweets, more Facebook stuff, more photos. So I'm using a site called PrintFeed now, which aggregates all that stuff together and makes it searchable. That's where the next evolution is going to come from, is filtering. You saw Facebook already add some filtering UI on their new design so that you could watch your friends or your business associates and see their stuff separate from loudmouth jerks like me on the Internet so that you can filter it out and make sense of it. And on Brentfeet, it's even deeper. Right. I can say I want to see all the items that have the word Obama in them, that have two or more likes and five or more comments. And I can see all that in real time brought back to you. That's really interesting.

So you did a post about how to use FriendFeed a while ago. Great video post tutorial. But someone that maybe someone's on Twitter and it's like FriendFeed. What the hell is FriendFeed? They should go find that first by email. What's like one or two TikTok tips that you can give kind of newbie users?

If you're already on Twitter, you're already ahead of the rest of the world. Right. So you're already understanding what this real time web is like and why you might need filtering. So if you go to search.twitter.com, you can search on Obama and see tweets, every tweet live as it comes in. So if there's a news event like a plane crash, you put plane crash in there and you're going to see everybody in the world. Like when the plane landed in the Hudson, there were 400 tweets going on every 20 seconds or so. So a huge amount. Now you're starting to get ready for FriendFeed because FriendFeed lets you do grouping of your friends and put, you know, have lists of friends that are separate from the masses. And also you can do much more dance searches. And also you're seeing that live stuff come through. Not just tweets, but YouTube videos and Flickr photos and blogs and Facebook news status messages. They're all coming in there live and you're being able to sort through that a little bit. And it's a community, so it's like a forum. It's a new decentralized forum.

So last question for you, obviously we're at south by Southwest with the Rackspace at the Rackspace Cloud party.

There it is.

Great T shirts, by the way.

Yeah, thank you.

But you know, a couple years ago, Twitter broke here.

Yep.

Have you seen anything that obviously there's.

Nothing that we broke here. That's right. This is the big news.

Go home with Rackspace.

That's right. Very cool out. Something on Saturday that seems like two weeks ago already. Too many parties. No, I haven't seen anything surprising. Remember, even Twitter didn't really break here. Twitter broke two weeks before that on Leo reports show. And that's what got it heated up. And then the game developer conference happened right after Leo's show and it heated up there. And then when everybody came here, it was white hot. Right. And that's why everybody thinks it's broke here. But it was actually a two, two week process to break here. And actually, you know, had been out for months before south by Southwest two years ago. So there was already momentum among all the Gujarati, you know, waiting to waiting.

For an excuse to really use to explode.

And it just exploded here because everybody in the tech industry is here, right here. Friend feed's gotten talked about quite a bit. Twitter is continuing to be hot here. I mean, people are still struggling to get on their iPhones to do tweets. Like, there's a secret party tonight that just got released on 32 bit, I think, Scott Beals. 32 bit. And it's spreading like wildfire. That's the location of that secret party.

Very cool. Well, Robert, best of luck at Racksmith. Thank you for your time.

Thank you so much.