Social media maker

The Los Angeles Times reported that Google is acquiring Slide, Inc, the maker of games, applications, and widgets for Facebook and MySpace.  TechCruch reported that the deal was worth $182 million plus $46 million in employee retention bonuses.

There are rumors that Google is working on a social media application called Google Me – a potential rival to Facebook.  Google earlier released a product named Google Buzz.  Buzz didn’t.

Where is Google going?

Is it a WAVE goodbye?

This week, Google announced that is was ceasing further development on its Wave product (or at least that’s when we heard it).  The reason? A lack of user adoption.  Google Wave was released only fourteen months ago with  major pronouncements that this product would change the way the world would share and exchange information.  Apparantly that hasn’t happened.

We expected great things but it seems that we may have been optimistic.  Here are some comments – not in priority order.

• New technologies and cultural changes take time.  Since we’re looking at less than fifteen months, there hasn’t been enough time for adoption. 
• Most of the early users were technology people including developers. The interest was to evaluate this platform.  Once that was done, then they were done.  Technologists are averse to the communications that Google Wave was created to facilitate.
• Google did not “terminate” Wave – only ceased further development. That means that its components could be re-purposed in another product.  The idea is great but must be presented better and differently.
• The specific implementation of Google Wave was clumsy.  It was difficult to get invitations to register as a user.  It was difficult to use.  We used it on projects but we found that only a core that became familiar with the product could use it – those that needed to be trained were discouraged early from using it and never did adopt it.

This won’t be the first time that Google has flubbed.  But Google has always landed on its feet. Would Wave functionality fit with Docs?  Or Gmail?  Or will another developer take the concepts of Wave and build a successful product?

Stay tuned.

More on Google Wave

We watched a video of the original presentation of Google Wave.  The presentation team reminded us of some earlier technologies such as bulletin boards and message boards.  These enable users to keep a record of messages that multiple people could read and post new messages.

The Google team also drew a contrast between conventional email (something they characterized as an older technology) and Google Wave which is characterized as a conversation.  The specific implementation speeds up the conversation by enabling the everyone on the conversation to see the message character by character.

One day, email will be obsolete.  Google Wave may be the replacement.

An expected component is a developer API which Google hopes will encourage others to build gadgets to work with Wave.  There are also extensions that are referred to as robots.

The Google video runs about 80 minutes and can be seen at http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html#video

Google Wave

Another technology that we are hearing more about is Google Wave.   What is it? How can it be used?

According to http://wave.google.com, Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Google Wave enables a group of users to share documents, join a “conversation”, get feedback, and record meeting minutes and discussions.  There are gadgets that are available to supplement a wave.

Our technology team provided this information and they will provide more specific information in another posting.  Consider this.  Is this the tool that can obsolete email?