google wave and the end of the destination web
June 15th, 2009 • posts i've written
If you don’t fancy watching the lengthy video above, Techcrunch has a nice wrap-up.
Google Wave promises to make communication more effective and efficient by essentially knocking down any and all barriers between people – ultimately content and conversation flow back and forth in real time through the Wave.
Suppose Google Wave was introduced in a vacuum, in a world where Twitter didn’t exist, Facebook either – it would make sense for all communication to happen through the Wave rather than rely on the destination or that technology to hold your social graph.
Now consider that you do currently have followers on Twitter, contacts on LinkedIn, friends on Facebook, etc – as the Wave liberates those conversations from those portals, what’s the value of any kind of destination web?
As human beings, we’re accustomed to orienting ourselves via location. We like things to have homes, URLs as a digital example. But RSS has already begun liberating us from the idea of digital destinations. I can read the content of over 300 separate sources in a single web app, my Google Reader. In a Wave world, I could push this post through a wave, to my readers (as a subset of my total social graph), and they could share and respond to that Wave in their own environment. The need for a URL, for a tiny comment box, and for returning to this domain to consume further conversation would be made obsolete.
This erosion of the destination web presents some interesting challenges – how will publishers monetize attention? how will we personalize our experience and our interactions with others?
One thing’s for sure – if Google can actually pull off integrating more active sharing through Wave, they’ll gain an incredible ability (through the increased volume) to decipher content, parse it for search, and collect a vast amount of data on the actual human beings using Wave.
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3 Responses (add your comment)
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Paul Drago June 15, 2009at 9:00 pm
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Bud, at the same time, don’t you think there’s a value in the aesthetics of various modes of interaction?
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the erosion of a destination based web means that crafty small businesses will have a chance to compete with big businesses (with the same sort ability they could 6 years ago via search)– by creating, crafting, and integrating properly with-in waves. (assuming they hit critical mass) small business owners ought to be able to get their products, services, and offerings in front of an audience for a *relatively* cheap price. I’m stoked to see what people do and all the interesting ways people use them to promote themselves, their businesses, and their interests.