The next wave of the social web unveiled: the end of SEND?
Hailed as the reinvention of online communication, this week Google announced its most ambitious project to date: a web-based social media mashup that combines email, instant messaging, tweeting, wikis, blogging, photo and video sharing, social bookmarking and even online gaming. Mobile-ready and open-source, developers were invited to take a look under the hood of the app immediately, encouraged by Google to hit the ground running in the race to build the most useful 3rd party apps. Wave will be released in public beta later this year.
Google says Wave will help people to “communicate and work together in a richer, more instant and integrated way.” Although the app was designed for business, and will certainly improve workflows, and has obvious educational uses, the demo made it immediately apparent that Wave will be equally adopted as a social networking app that users will embrace as much (though likely more) for personal as for professional communications and collaborations. Google Wave will be taken up en masse as an instrument for leisure and work, as part of a media-rich life, one steeped in social networking and continuous connectivity.
Google Wave encourages what Chris Dannen of Fast Company calls “rich formatting” which translates roughly into massively multiplayer multimedia filesharing. That means it’s the next big thing for generation C(ontent)–it is both revolutionary and overdue, as many users have, at this point, been required to cobble together suites of socnet tools, sites, and apps, and then try to corral users/contacts and friends across multiple forums such as FriendFeed, Blogger, Twitter, delicious, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The end of SEND
This app is about live web transmissions–and it was purpose designed to support “faster conversations.” Google Wave assumes that users want to be engaged in easy, spontaneous, and instant multimedia sharing, of images and various digitized information (including maps and online games). This is to say that Google designed Wave to serve and to encourage the development of active, prosuming, creative, publics–those who are more intrigued by rapid connectivity than they are self-conscious or self-editing. Wave may spell the end of (hitting) SEND–because users can watch each other type in near-real time. Enter some text and it appears on the shared screenspace of the wave, instantly–making the pause-proofread-post approach to CMC obsolete.
In some sense Google Wave is supporting an already-emergent mass cultural craving for real-time and crowdsourced search results (exactly the features which explain Twitter’s ascendancy and mainstreaming). If Google’s demo is any indication, to use Google Wave is to participate in instantaneous and near-synchronous connectivity and collaboration. Certainly users of this app who together ride a wave will experience new forms of computer-mediated virtual immediacy and intimacy, in semi-public spaces.
Generational Connectivity & Division
The emergence of Google Wave also presumes (and reflects) contemporary everyday digital media use habits, and our growing comfortableness with living in public. The app will likely be embraced by a younger web-savvy, socnet born-and-bred crowd, says Mark Hachman at PCMagazine, whereas it is “way too complicated for email-savvy grandparents.”
As such, Wave is an excellent example of communications technologies that operate both centripetally (linking people together), while simultaneously (and paradoxically) causing a centrifugal effect (dividing people–in this case, generationally). An interesting recent (2008) academic paper on communication technology and this paradox is excerpted by Google Books here.
Disruptive Technology
Google is ushering in an important and controversial shift in how users participate online. As MG Siegler observed at TechCrunch: “Google isn’t just thinking of Wave as another web app that it creates and you use on one site—it wants you to be able to use it across all sites on the web.” For that reason, this app is being hailed by many as truly game-changing, “disruptive technology”–and for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, surely it will be, since users will be able to pull content from those sites while remaining firmly located, along with their friends and colleagues, within a single browser pane–Google’s digital territory.
As a result, reviewers at The Mirror.co.uk correctly observed that this app “threatens to make old fashioned forums completely and utterly obsolete.” Clearly Wave is in keeping with the trend Siva Vaidhyanathan famously described as “the googlization of everything.”
