Find your place in a world where everything is a tap away

The way online communities are evolving fascinates Paul Berry, founder and CEO of social media curation site RebelMouse.

"When they discover the ruins of our civilization later, how will they ever have any idea how connected everything was?" he wonders.

Berry and three other founders of Web 3.0 companies will discuss the smartphone-connected, social, mobile, always-on world during their panel "The World at Your Fingertips" at Real Estate Connect New York City, which runs Jan. 16-18 at the Grand Hyatt New York hotel.

When everything is a tap away, what are the implications for real estate?

Joining Berry on the Connect stage to contemplate that question will be Ted Roden, founder and CEO of subscription-based assistant service Fancy Hands; Lily Liu, founder and CEO of PublicStuff, a service that helps citizens notify their local government about things that need fixing; Rafat Ali, founder and CEO of the travel industry-focused online publication Skift; and Inman News Publisher Brad Inman, who will moderate the discussion.

"Neighborhoods are changing and evolving and becoming better and more connected as people share and collaborate more," Berry said.

RebelMouse collates users’ social media personas — snippets from Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus — and presents them as one live page. For example, see Craigslist founder and Real Estate Connect speaker Craig Newmark’s RebelMouse page.

Today’s digital reality is an amazing, somewhat-overwhelming place, Berry said. "I like to take a moment to appreciate the crazy miracles of the technologies we’ve created," he said.

A few might consider the crazy miracles of today’s connected world the substance of Roden’s business Fancy Hands. "Even though I founded the company, it feels like magic when someone comes here, knows what they’re going to do, and it’s all been paid for already," Roden said.

The service helps out with "everything," Roden said, including the weird and offbeat and the mundane. "We’ve written love poems to someone’s girlfriend (they were good poems)," he said. "We pay for and/or dispute a lot of parking tickets."

If a Fancy Hands employee were hired to report a pothole to the local government, he or she might use Liu’s company PublicStuff, which turns citizens’ smartphones into civic antennae.

"We started this company on the premise of providing tools to both citizen and government users, so they can effectively communicate and influence things that affect the quality of their daily lives," Liu told Inman News recently for a Connect preview story featuring her.

Rafat Ali, founder of the digital media business-focused site paidContent, now owned by tech media site GigaOM, founded skift — Swedish for "shift" — in 2012 to tackle the business of travel industry news.

Initially, skift will prepare its content for those in the travel industry and, down the road, will expand its audience to include consumers, specifically business travelers, Ali told AllThingsD last year.

Real Estate Connect New York City will take place Jan. 16-18 at the Grand Hyatt New York.