Tsunami: Google Wave's Preview Sweeps Social Media into a New Geography

A tsunami, an enormous tidal wave created by major undersea earthquakes, can be a devastating phenomenon for people, places and things in its path, often changing lives and landscapes permanently. A tsunami can be difficult to detect, though, as its enormous force lays hidden beneath the ocean's surface until it approaches the shallow waters near land. Within moments a placid, established scene can change into one of total destruction and disarray.

So it seems to be with the preview of Google Wave , a new social media publishing technology that was opened recently to people who had signed up for the early adopters program back in May. As I wrote in ContentBlogger back then, I saw Wave having the potential to be a highly scalable and transforming technology that could grow extremely rapidly on the decades of development that have gone into cloud computing technologies. No small wonder, then, that I was compelled to sign up for the early adopters program on the day of the initial public demo of Wave. Four months later, my invitation to be one of the first 100,000 people to participate in the initial Wave preview program arrived in my email inbox. Along with that honor came the opportunity to send invitations to eight other people to join the Wave preview program, which I gave out on a first-come, first-served basis to a message that I broadcast on Twitter.

Within hours, it seemed as if Wave invites were becoming more valuable than winning lottery tickets, a frenzy accelerated by Google's waiting to add the "nominated' invitees for several days. After a week of typical initial performance problems and users grappling with "How do I make a Wave?" questions, Wave emerged as a platform with features and content adequate enough to invite in nominees who were eagerly waiting to start playing. In little more than a week, a technology went from being a gleam in the eyes of Google developers to becoming a major new social media platform being pounded on by nearly a million people with childlike abandon - with millions more clamoring to play as soon as possible. The content started streaming through the public and private channels of Wave at Twitter-like speeds. People of all nations, languages, interests, including lawyers, scientists, sports enthusiasts, gamers, technologists and just plain curious people began to play with Wave's features and collaborate on content.

Yet Wave is still just an early-stage technology that is struggling to find its footing. There is enormous interest and much goodwill from developers looking for a new publishing platform to exploit, but this is not a ready-to-launch platform just yet. Some features, such as the ability to access content that can be viewed by anyone on Wave, are still difficult to grasp at first, while other basic features, such as moving content into organizing folders and activating editing functions, are still rather balky at times. Still other features have yet to be implemented yet. Nevertheless, given little more than a blank interface and a few short videos, hundreds of thousands of people have grasped the basics of how to build, share, edit and enhance waves and are building new audiences rapidly in fascinating new ways.

From what I've seen so far in Wave I think that my assumptions about the potential impact of Wave are likely to become true over time - and, perhaps, a relatively short period of time. We tend to forget that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have grown up incrementally over several years, exploding into rapid exponential growth only recently. While it may be at least a year or two before Wave's full impact begins to become apparent, having such a diverse and global community in a matter of days creating content and exercising features cannot help but to accelerate Wave's path in that time frame. Here are a few of the key areas in which Wave is likely to deliver tsunami-like force in the months and years ahead:

• A breakthrough in collaborative communication. Wave is an interesting mix of email-like private and group communications blended with instant messaging-like features, collaborative editing similar on concept to wikis and commenting similar to forums and blog comments. Wave's strength is not that it does what any one of these types of social media tools does better so much as it does something that is a unique blend of all of these tools. For example, a person started a wave with me that was at first just an email-like exchange of complete ideas. Soon we were editing our messages at the same time, watching what one another was typing on the screen together, as in an overlapping conversation. When we had exhausted the topic, with his consent I published the wave as a public wave and inserted a poll, which in turn is attracting a whole new range of comments and content. This is a far more dynamic approach to content and idea development than one finds typically in most collaborative platforms. In Wave, any wave could be a messaging thread, a collaborative content development effort, an embedded application, a string of comments or all of these. This un-fussy way to approach collaboration on any level, be it personal, group, enterprise or public, is likely to lead to a breakthrough in collaborative content development that other social media technologies have not been able to provide in full. What email, forums and wikis have promised, Wave delivers.
  
• Better ways to integrate content. One of the more interesting features of Wave is its ability to embed both Web content and applications into waves. This is an "old hat" concept for some social media platforms, but the fluidity with which people can do this in the conversational format of waves and the ability of people to generate content collaboratively within and around these content objects provides a remarkably flexible space in which to experience and share content. Instead of having to do embedding in a branded portal, where there's lots of "noise" from largely superfluous information and services, Wave enables content integration rapidly on whatever blank slate suits a particular purpose. While specialty portals and applications will continue to thrive, Wave is an environment in which so much information can be delivered in a very focused manner that it will absorb far more of our energies and attention than email and Web sites have absorbed. It's not the most powerful application in terms of detailed functionality, but that in and of itself makes it an ideal, neutral container for any number of kinds of applications to thrive in a collaborative space.
  
• New ways to collaborate across language barriers. One of the most impressive things that I have seen in Wave so far is how it has become an international phenomenon rapidly. Looking at the public Wave messages, people from all over the world have adopted this new technology and are working hard to put it to good use. The real-time translation services that are available in Google Wave are therefore likely to be put to good use quite rapidly, especially with its ability to see people typing in real-time. People with different languages will be able to "hear" one another "speaking" through these translation services in a collaborative environment that will help to accelerate personal and professional relationships rapidly. While it's still an early-stage capability, these real-time translation services offer the promise of helping people to communicate globally who otherwise would be isolated by their language skills. Real-time translation is still a very new technology, but I do believe that it will turn out to be one of the most critical components that will enable Wave to become a new kind of conversational content platform, stimulating relationships and markets worldwide. As voice services become a part of the Wave environment, expect that impact to grow even more quickly.
  

Any one of these factors individually may not sound to be particularly impressive. However, when you begin to look at the outlines of a world in which finished content is sent from one place to another, an environment like Wave that invites people into collaborative content spaces with many different levels for everything from quick messages to full-blown publication development is very likely to change many of the fundamentals of the geography of human communications. Content will become far less about "what I gave to you" and far more about "what we shared with one another" in a common space. As I mention in Chapter 7 of Content Nation, social media's strength has always been focused on creating value in "third places," venues in which we come out of our own spaces to share ideas and experiences with one another. Think of Google Wave as having the potential to be the world's largest "third place" machine, generating community, context and collaboration on the fly on any scale on a durable basis for any audience, be it private or public. As in the early stages of a tsunami, the full impact of Wave is still far away from being realized on the beaches of public consciousness. But when this wave breaks in the next few years, it has the potential to sweep away many of our basic assumptions about what we are able to do with one another via communications services.