Is Google’s Wave The Best Way for REAL People to Communicate?
It has been almost two years since I first signed up for Twitter, though I was not at nearly at the vanguard of what has become the latest Internet craze, I do distinctly remember having people approach to ask me what the “Ali is Twittering…” next to my Facebook status meant.
Though I don’t see Twitter as a social networking tool per se (nor do I see any new Facebooks, Myspaces, or Friendsters emerging any time soon) I began to think what is the “next” big web service to take off the way Twitter and Facebook have in recent years?
As I have been telling people for the past few years, any next “it” website/service online will have to serve some sort of utilitarian function or solve a communication problem that other tools don’t currently offer Internet users.
Based on what I have seen and heard of the upstart websites and those that have yet to make their much-hyped debuts Google Wave, if executed correctly, may be the only service to fill in the communication gaps that have plagued web users since Email and have yet to be fully resolved by the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
In my experience, Twitter hasn’t served a truly useful function for connecting individual people the way that Email and social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace have (to varying degrees of success).
Though Twitter is a novel concept, it seems to be a more valuable tool for collecting information than it has been a way to connect people. Obviously throughout the Iranian Election and the Gaza air strikes earlier this year, Twitter showed the world its usefulness as a tool for relaying important on the ground information from situations where the more traditional forms of media, for one reason or another, are not granted access to the information required to report directly from the scene. That is perhaps its greatest potential strength – the fact that can truly set it apart from the competition.
Twitter has also served well known brands (both corporate and celebrity) well, and in some ways has become like a new form of RSS feeds, hence ‘valuable tool for collecting information.’ It seems like we know more about Ashton Kutcher @aplusk and Kim Kardashian @kimkardashian than we do about the people we know in real life because of Twitter.
Whereas predecessors like Friendster were initially criticized for connecting you with people you already knew in real life, rather than Friendster’s purported goal of helping people meet new people around them online, as a tool, Twitter has made us feel closer to the people on TV than the people who watch TV with us.
On the other hand, Facebook is an actual social network that allows you to connect to people you know in really interesting ways thanks to its apps interface, constant stream of updates, and expansion to allow people beyond college students to join the now booming social network.
In many ways, Facebook’s ability to track you in all aspects of your life through ‘networks’ – locations, schools, and jobs – allows for real people to connect or re-connect in much easier ways than its rival Myspace. However, with the glut of information on the News Feed, and the ability of more and more people to contact you, Facebook is quickly losing the utilitarianism that set it apart from then chief rival Myspace. In many ways, Facebook has lost everything that made it stand out from Myspace when the Murdoch owned social networking site was still king.
Facebook used to be where you could keep in actual contact with people you encountered on a daily basis (most notably when it was a campus specific service) in a clean, easy to navigate interface. Now, with the proliferation of pages, apps, quizzes, and games, Facebook looks more like Myspace circa 2005 than it does anything resembling the original college only social network we all knew and once loved. In fact, all of these features and enhancements has only made Facebook much more complicated to actually use than Myspace has ever been. Try changing your picture, deleting a friend, finding recently added friends, adjusting your privacy settings, etc. and tell me how ‘easy’ it is.
Aside from all of the new features, Facebook’s insistence on opening up the system has also created a glut of people on the service. Whereas a few years ago we all migrated from Myspace to Facebook to get away from the crowds, random requests, requests of people we haven’t seen or heard from in years (and probably have little to no intention of talking to now), we are now plagued with all of these same masses on Facebook. What’s worse is that with each new friend added come more entries on the News Feed and once again you are overloaded with information.
It seems Twitter has become more of an RSS Reader or a celebrity rolodex and Facebook your own crowd-sourced trivial information overload service and neither truly connects you to the people in your life you actually want to talk to online.
With Google Wave in limited preview, the service could fill the gap left by Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace as a service that allows for threaded realtime and time-delayed conversations, complete with attachments, between real people who actually know each other.
Many people have pointed to Wave’s potential as a business tool, but if Google is smart in their marketing, they could easily reach those people who want to stay connected with one another without being overloaded with unwanted information and the prospect of others possibly seeing the back and forth of their conversation.
Yes, EMail still exists, but as a tool of daily non-work or school-related communication, it is largely on its deathbed. Wave, with it’s mix of IM, chatroom, EMail, message board, and networking sensibilities could potentially make all of that much more easy and attractive to users looking to stay in contact with people they actually know.
By taking cues from EMail address books and IM buddy lists, Wave is separating itself from the social networks. The people you interact with on Wave are the people you choose. There is no option for someone to request to be your ‘friend,’ you can add them to your contact list if you want and even then you can control which waves they see and who else in your contact list they can interact with. Also, in mixing threaded time-delayed conversations that can handle attachments with real-time chat features, Wave sets itself apart in that unlike EMail you are not forced to await a response (it comes live to you as the other person types) and unlike IM, the conversation does not have to end when the other person signs off (it can pick up right where it left off). Great for people in different time zones or those discussing on-going events.
Of course, there are still some improvements that must be made in Wave. Most notably, there has to be a more clear way to illustrate the flow of the conversation and separate threads. I understand that Wave is setup to emulate threaded conversations, but Google’s minimalist interface has lead to many unnecessarily split threads. As a result, the logical order that Wave hopes to create through threaded conversations is lost and there isn’t a way to re-order the threads after the fact. There also isn’t a way to re-arrange actual waves.
Whether Google Wave turns out to be the next gMail remains to be seen. Even if Google Wave doesn’t over take EMail anytime soon though, doesn’t mean it has to be Orkut 2.0 if Google can market the service correctly. Because if they can get the interface and features just right, for every corporate team there will be at least a few friends and family members who will want to use the service to keep in contact with one another through a service that is still more powerful than EMail but not as public as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.