I just love keeping in touch with people on the Internet. In the past I used a range of platforms to communicate with people on the Internet, but it finally looks like Google Wave will bring it all together.
I use email, but the persistent spam and the non web-based POP- 3 based email gets tiring. Chat programs are kind of nice but they eat up so much time I always have to turn them off. Blogs tend to be hard to build communities around.
For a while I thought Twitter or Facebook would be the next thing, but it became obvious pretty quickly that the need for these services to make a profit could possibly destroy them as a legitimate means of communication. Twitter certainly scores points for simplifying the ability maintain a cyberpresence beyond merely personal contacts. It’s a shame this was picked up by advertisers and marketing gurus, because as they say in real estate, “there goes the neighborhood.”
Just about the same thing happened to Facebook, which caught on as a more serious alternative to MySpace but it soon became apparent that the somewhat clunky Facebook software and interface did not add up to the universal sharing platform it promised to be.
Google Wave promises to combine the functionality of all of these programs, and it will be open source. That’s the thing about Google. They’re only well established enough to think long term about revenue, but they actually kind of understand the Internet’s potential, which really has nothing to do with marketing or manipulation. Instead, it has to do with collaboration and sharing for the benefit of both parties. It would be horrible to think that Facebook might end up the only place that people went all because it was a little easier at first. This may be something the old-time AOL users could deal with.
But if it ends up being something that matters to people in some revolutionary way then let’s all hope things don’t go the way it went with online auctions, where you end up with only one big player. Then again, there is no reason to think that will happen, because Google Wave promises to have a grand rollout later this year and it claims to be a platform that uses all the currently trendy web-based communications in a new combined way that will turn your computer into a little cyber neighbourhood.
Related posts:
- Remember the Milk
- Sony PSP Go!
- Google’s G1 Android
- FireFox 3.6 Namoroka
- Next Generation Wi-Fire USB WiFi Adapter Review
