Watched most of this 80 minute video from Google’s developer conference earlier this year on Monday and applied for an invitation, of course with all the talk today about the first “wave” (no pun intended) going out I thought I’d throw out my two cents:
1) My first thought was, “Man, this is starting to look a lot like Facebook,” followed up by “Facebook is in a much better position to do this and succeed than Google.” Why? Well, because they already are. Facebook has almost always been about real-time, personal collaboration. Whether it’s sharing, tagging, organizing, and commenting on photos, posting status updates, or sending invites, the 300MM+ users of Facebook have been enjoying a lot of the Wave features for a while.
2) I agree with the talking heads that this is a leap forward, but more of a symbolic leap, not a material leap. It’s another sign post, and significant simply because it’s Google, that all personal data, relationships, communications, content will be universally linked, organized and accessible. It is another step towards the irrelevancy of terms like “online” as there will soon be no such thing as offline.
3) This affirms that Google is scared about the real-time, personal data that Facebook has in droves and Google covets. But I don’t think Wave will get them there as I think it will be widely viewed and used as an email enhancement rather than a real-time social tool. Some of the advancements, however should have gotten Facebook’s attention and I assume they’ve been looking at this since March/May (whenever it was originally announced) and have engineers working on tweaks to its existing service making collaboration easier and richer. Once they do, Facebook, though pushed by Google as they often are, will not lose too much ground on this front.
4) Bigger picture: This isn’t about Google trying to become like Facebook. Hell, I don’t think Facebook even cares about being Facebook anymore. The aim of both companies has to be much loftier if they’re to succeed, and that is, namely, to own all of your real-time personal data. Period. And if Wave does, as is assumed, become the bridge that merges Gmail, Docs, Voice, Blogger, etc. and do so elegantly and in a way that doesn’t seem like a new service or tool but rather just sort of sits in the background and enables all of these intertwined, cross-platform, cross-service personal connections while on the backend mining all of that data to be sliced and diced and served up to marketers… then all of a sudden the whole notion of online social networks becomes irrelevant. Ultimately Wave is about one thing: laying pipe. In the information age whoever owns the pipes and keeps the data flowing, wins.
