that’s a total balloon boy…

16 Oct, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment

From now on, you should use balloon boy to refer to anything that ends up being less awesome than you had hoped…

For example, “Google Wave is a total balloon boy.”

google wave and the end of the destination web

15 Jun, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

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.