By Yvonne Paris

Rob Gonda of Sapient (a digital, advertising, interactivity and consulting firm) thinks that in the future, your refrigerator might be able to tweet that you’re running out of milk and butter. He aims to imagine the entire internet as a focus group in his SXSW panel “Real-time everything: the Era of Communication Ubiquity.” He’ll tackle issues of real time, focus groups, IPv6, user-generated content and the possibilities for the future through real-time tools.

So what is IPv6? IPv6 is the next-generation Internet Protocol version designated as the successor to IPv4. IPv4 was the first implementation in the Internet and still used today. It is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworks.

Gonda will open up dialogue about the possibilities of the constant analysis of real-time information sharing, visualizing trends, comparing brands and making predictions with this information over time. What he’s really getting at here, is the possibility to monitor all this real-time communication to avoid using samples to represent populations – he conceptualizes analyzing the entire population instead of making generalizations about what we know from focus groups and control groups (aka samples). The implications of this idea are powerful.

Gonda posted this funny video on his blog about the death of Twitter, and the emergence of Flutter, a (fake/humorous) nano-blogging site. The eyeglasses are a great idea…….. 🙂

Does he really believe Twitter is dying? No way. “In late 2008, Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4 to 5 million users,” Gonda said. “A Compete.com blog entry in February of 2009 ranks Twitter as the third largest social network behind Facebook and MySpace, and reporter it had roughly 6 million users and 55 million monthly visitors.”

Check out his blog at RobGonda.com or Takemetoyourleader.com (The later has tons of interesting information about trends in marketing, consumer behaviors, technology and social media.