I remember being literally 12 when google docs was launched, which featured real-time sync, and a collaborative cursor. I remember thinking that this is how all web experience will be in the future, at the time 'cloud computing' was the buzzword - I (incorrectly) thought realtime collaboration was the very definition of cloud computing.
And then it just... never happened. 20 years went by, and most web products are still CRUD experiences, such as this site included.
The funny thing is it feels like it's been on the verge of becoming mainstream for all this time. When meteor.js got popular I was really excited, and then with react surely it was gonna happen - but even now, it's still not the default choice for new software.
I'm still really excited to see it happen, and I do think it will happen eventually - it's just trickier than it looks, and it's tricky to make the tooling so cheap that it's worth it in all situations.
Real-time collaboration ? Discord (not fundamentally different than IRC, which has been around since the 90s), Zoom (or any other teleconferencing software)
This site being a CRUD app is a feature. Sometimes simplicity is best. I wouldn't want realtime updates, too distracting.
I feel the same way. The initial magic of real-timeness felt like a glimpse into a future that... where is it?
I'm still excited about the prospects of it — shameless plug: actually building a tool with one-of-a-kind messaging experience that's truly real-time in the Google docs collaboration way (no compose box, no send button): https://kraa.io/hackernews
That's a really cool project! The realtime message aspect reminds me a bit of https://honk.me/, but for like, docs.
Agreed, I did a talk about exactly this earlier this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjV3Dm5giko
Interesting talk. I think it's just a matter of making tooling where it's so easy, cheap, and simple enough that doing realtime doesn't introduce any extra time cost to a business compared to CRUD.
The speed of light is rather unaccommodating.
We run into human-perceptible relativistic limits in latency. Light takes 56ms to travel half the earth's circumference, and our signals are often worse off. They don't travel in an idealized straight path, get converted to electrons and radio waves, and have to hop through more and more hoops like load balancers and DDOS protections.
In many cases latency is worse than it used to be.
as you point out so vividly, the speed of light is actually not a problem given you can ping across an ocean in sub 100ms (not a laser beam, actual packets through underwater pipes). 56ms is acceptable latency for realtime video