Reviving the Global .Beat
Why now is perfect to bring back Swatch Internet Time
The year was 1998
The dotcom bubble was in full swing, Swatch was celebrating its fifteenth birthday, and they’d just introduced a novel concept to the world which aimed to redefine the way we perceive and measure time for the new millennium.
Swatch Internet Time
The long forgotten Swatch Internet Time was poised to change the way we arranged time online with each other.
We all know trying to work with time zones suck. So rather than bullshit around with online converters, the smart boffins at Swatch devised a way for us to meet without needing the mental gymnastics to figure it all out.
And they called this…
.BEAT TIME
The way it worked was that each day was broken up into increments of 1000 ‘.Beats’, each single .Beat was the equivalent of 1 Minute 26.4 Seconds, but you didn’t have to remember that because .Beat time was the same no matter where on the Earth you’re located.
And the novel, more linguistic way you write .Beat time is with the @ symbol before a 3 digit number, from @000 to @999
So let’s say I have a friend in Los Angeles and I’m located in Melbourne, Australia.
If it’s .Beat @104, that’s bang on 12:30pm for me, and for my friend in LA it’s 6:30pm for them… not to shabby to jump online have a chat, play a game, whatever.
But we don’t need to remember anything about time zones, just that .Beat @104 is a great time for us to both be online at the same time.
Because you already you know what your local time is, all you need to know is what block of .Beats you’ll be available for.
- So for me in Melbourne, I’m available from about @938, till around @417.
- For my friend in LA it’s more like @604, to about @150.
Meaning if I looked at the .Beat time, and it was .Beat @104 like in my example above, I’d know that I could sling them a message and probably get a response pretty quickly.
But, it never took off…
Let’s look at the serious advantages of Swatch Internet Time
- Literally designed for a global internet
- Makes it easier to figure out when you’re online
- Doesn’t care about daylight savings bullshit
- And it’s zero-based, means no time zones!
So why didn’t it become a smashing success?
Well, for a couple of reasons.
One was because the world really wasn’t ready for decimal time, just like it wasn’t ready for it in the late 1700s when France switched over between 1794 and 1800. Mind you the French version was convoluted and overcomplicated, so much so that even they saw how mad their system was and reverted back a mere 6 years later.
Another was because while Swatch developed it for utility on a global scale, they sure did make it more about the marketing of brand new watches to sell you rather than the unifying power of a new time format.
And the watches they developed weren’t what you’d call… attractive.
Of course, there’s also the fact that it’s incredibly hard to convince a global population to do anything as singular as adopt an entirely new time system.
Especially since we all spent years learning the concepts of GMT and UTC while we were growing up.
New concept + unattractive products + profit-first marketing = I mean, it failed right?
Why it’s more relevant now than ever
It’s high time (yes yes, pun intended) that we revisit .Beat time, not only as a concept, but a way to unify people across the globe.
But if it’s going to work it needs to be made truly open source, given to the world freely, and not attached to any sort of sales pitch or company brand.
It’s also something that should be made highly available as another option for timekeeping on the devices we already love to use.
The fact that we’re rapidly heading towards becoming a borderless society, and spending vast amounts of our time communicating with each other online, then making it easier to connect is such a no brainer.
