UXjam

The Wave of the Future, Part 1: It’s not a Twitter-killer

I am for some reason having a terrible time trying to formulate a coherent post about Google Wave (perhaps because I want to say so much about it), so I am going to try play the “reversal” game @livlab brought up at RefreshPhilly on Monday — let’s ask, what might *not* be awesome about Google Wave?

Adoption barrier. Since Wave is a thoroughly social technology, a reasonable amount of people have to convert for it to be of any value to anyone. I don’t use Orkut because none of my friends use Orkut — we use Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, AIM, etc. Only time will tell whether Wave will pick up quite the following of these other technologies, and at this point there are 2 factors that can predetermine the rapid adoption necessary for Wave to reach its potential: hype and functionality.

Hype they have no problem getting. The Twittersphere was abuzz last Friday after the Google I/O developer preview, and excitement will surely ebb and flow until Wave finally hits the public.

The hype isn’t just about the technology, of course. It’s also about Google’s position in the realm of social medial. Before Wave was announced, one of the big rampant rumors was that the Google Search Giant would be felled by the ever-growing army of 140-character soldiers that feed into Twitter’s (relatively new) search. I refuse to buy into such a concept, especially when I see things like #robotpickuplines and #3wordsaftersex trending daily…unless they develop some magic spam-filtering algorithm, it’s more a gauge of memes than of…well, what exactly is Twitter search for, anyway?

Seeing what people are talking about, I suppose. It’s a window into Web zeitgeist. The content of Twitter is nothing like the content of the Web. Twitter search only satisfies your information needs if someone has recently (unless you’re willing to scroll through every result) tweeted about what you’re looking for, and managed to squeeze the exact words that you used into their 140 characters. Even if Twitter had a phenomenal algorithm, there’s just not actually that much “real” content, *and* there’s no way to index it well enough to provide the value of a “real” search engine.

One of the things that makes Twitter great for finding current info is getting links that people have posted. However, since people use TinyURL and other services to conserve characters, these links aren’t permanent — they expire after a certain amount of time, at which point many of these tweets become virtually useless. Additionally, I doubt tweets are indexed with the contents of the linked sites (or even the actual URL in most cases)…so if I wanted to search Twitter to find a specific Wired article I remember one of my friends tweeting about, I probably wouldn’t be able to find it unless my friend said “Wired” or something relating to the subject in the tweet…rather than “Check out this great article! [insert shortlink here]”

So Twitter search has its place. After all, Trending Topics was how I heard about Google Wave. But it’s no Google-killer.

And now back to Wave…is it a Twitter-killer? No way in hell. With the Twave application, it’s built in — if you can’t beat the social networks by joining them, build them into your shiny new communication medium. If anything, it might lead to more people finding the value in Twitter. Having it integrated into the “inbox” experience a little more closely might make it easier to get started. 

AIM away messages were a nascent form of Twitter. Having that buddy list on the right side of my screen all the time since 5th grade, people’s status messages were the original ambient intimacy. AOL once had a large hold on how people interacted on the Internet because it was the major ISP, and the average user settled for the built-in browser, e-mail, etc. Nowadays it seems like ISPs and applications rarely go hand-in-hand for the average user — I pay Comcast for the Internet, but Comcast.net definitely isn’t my homepage, and I’ve never even tried their e-mail (granted, I’m not entirely average). Rather, Google is my dominant application provider — I recently switched to using AIM solely through Gmail since I have it open all the time anyway, and I’m starting to use Google Docs more and more for spreadsheets that I need to access anywhere and share with other people. I keep track of my time solely by my Google Calendar, and even use calendar invites to plan social gatherings with a couple of my friends since we’re so busy.

Now wouldn’t it be nice if all my events from Facebook, MeetUp, etc. just Waved themselves into my calendar without me having to enter information manually? That’s the sort of integration Google’s getting at by releasing Wave as an API and a protocol. For once, Google’s letting some of its engineering secrets out of the bag because they know something like this can’t succeed otherwise.

Not only does there need to be interoperability with existing and future streams of communication, but there must be the ability to break the technology out of the Google box so they don’t develop some massive information monopoly. I’m not personally paranoid about Google using my information for any sort of nefariousness (the “Don’t be evil” credo is oddly comforting), but many people are, and many businesses and organizations have confidential information they’d rather not have living on someone else’s servers. In the preview, they start out saying “What would e-mail look like if it was invented today?” That’s what makes Google Wave different Gmail or Apps or the latest iteration of MS Exchange — that approach, if nothing else. Don’t just build another client — build a new service. Everyone uses e-mail, it’s a reliable open standard, but it could be so much more nowadays.

If people don’t build systems that function seamlessly based around Waves, they will remain simply another awesome Google product, and a large part of the hype will be lost — at least on this front. Even if they somehow don’t catch on, the technology is still pretty exciting. There are a ton of other facets to the technology as it was depicted in the preview that I haven’t even gotten to yet…my favorite being *contextual spell check*…but they’re for another time since I’ve already rambled on long enough here!