Now that I’ve had a chance to play with Google Wave a bit and to hear what other people have to say about it I’ve noticed that a lot of people are disappointed and it seems to me that they have missed the point.

Google Wave is a platform, a framework, an infrastructure. It has a front end, but that’s not really what is impressive about it (which is a good thing considering the complexity and bugginess right now). What is amazing is that Google has developed a real-time communication framework that can work in a federated environment. Why is this cool? Because it means that I can use it at work behind firewalls, at home for my family and personal projects, set it up at school with the right privacy to comply with child protection laws and also participate in it publicly on Google’s servers or anyone else’s I prefer. And it will still work in real time, across these servers transparently to me or securely within them. It won’t be “a Wave clone” that I have to beg everyone else to sign up for. It will just be Wave on a different server. All my contacts can be shared and my communications flow as freely between them, or I can create a walled garden. The choice is will be up to me.

People aren’t getting it right now because they’re expecting the beta to all be about polishing the User Experience. But it’s not about polishing: it’s about defining. This is similar to the introduction of Microsoft Surface: here is a great big flashy table with a powerful computer in it that responds to touch. At first exposure it sounds awesome, but what can you do with it? How will people be most comfortable interacting with it? What practical tasks can it facilitate? What fun can be had with it? The potential is there, but the only way to really know how it should best be used is to have a lot of people attempt to interact with it, without preconceptions, to figure out what the natural ways to interact with it actually are. There have been a lot of surprises as more and more people are able to play with it. A whole new set of gestures and user interface elements have been developed for Surface and refined as more and more people actually use them. I had the opportunity to participate in part of that process and it was fascinating.

I see Google Wave’s release as very similar to Microsoft Surface’s. There is a really powerful back-end underneath the UI that is capable of some amazing things, yet there haven’t been enough people exposed to it for the development team to really know the best way to provide efficient interaction with that engine. I think that is the purpose of the closed beta, to figure those things out. But people have these unrealistic expectations based on the misuse of the whole “beta” concept that what Google has is just a tiny step away from being ready for release to the world. That’s just not the case. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a ton of potential in Wave, and, to those of us out there than can appreciate the magnificence of the accomplishment of the platform that Google Wave is built on, it is very impressive indeed.

To all you fellow beta testers out there: give it some time and give Google some feedback and you will see Wave become much more intuitive to use (as well as less buggy and more performant). Developers will build alternative clients and more and more widgets for it. Waves will become just one more format for communication that we won’t even think about, we’ll just use in the way that’s most appropriate for the type of communication we need at the time. There will be “client views” for particular tasks based on who you are communicating with and their accessibility. If they’re offline you will use an email-like view to compose messages to them. If they’re online, you’ll use something more akin to IM or Twitter. All the stuff that is currently confusing and gets in your way (scrolling down huge waves just to find the new messages) will be fixed to no longer clutter your experience. And you will eventually be able to customize your client to make it even more efficient for how you want to receive your information, not just how you create and share it. These things will come as more people are exposed to Wave and see the potential and write their own solutions to the new problems that are becoming obvious now that there are enough other people to interact with on the service.

It’s new, and in closed beta. It’s not fair to write it off as “over-hyped”, especially when the hype has been coming from people who were interpreting screen shots or didn’t really understand that Wave is a new platform and not really a new UI to “fix the problem of email” or become the next social media magnet site. Google let us beta testers try it out to figure out how we’re reacting to the new communications capabilities Wave’s framework offers. Give Google the feedback they need to make it better for everyone.

Wave offers us a new way to communicate digitally that is adaptable to our immediate situation and needs. Wave is not out to replace Twitter, Facebook, IM or email: the point is to render them obsolete. That will happen without a lot of protest once someone figures out the ulitimate client for the already amazing platform Google has built… it will just seem natural.

I’ve been thinking about the Geek Divide after Pete’s post yesterday on it (from which I found Scott Karp’s geek qualification list list that inspired me to create my own).

This is a subject close to my heart, being what I am. But I often wonder, why can’t everyone just be geeky?? How come everyone doesn’t get excited about new technology? Why does the world have so many oblivious, uninterested or just plain ludditious people in it?

Yes, I am firmly entrenched in my little reality tunnel, but I often honestly wonder how people in this day and age can even avoid being geeky. I think it’s an age thing. Maybe things just move too fast for most folks over the age of 25…

I believe that most of the kids 16 and under will be geeks by default. Exposure to computers, the internet, cell phones and gaming consoles for their entire life can’t help but make it so. And it doesn’t phase them that it changes wholly in a matter of months. From their perspective, that rate of change is a normal part of life. And I think that’s a good thing because the rate of change is only going to accelerate.

TAD and I were very entertained by two “popular looking” high school aged kids at the Apple store the other night that were playing with an iLife on an iBook and had to call their friends on their cell and tell them to come see all the awesome stuff it could do. That never would have happened even 5 years ago. Every time we go there are gaggles of teenage girls ohhing and ahhing over iPods and cameras and laptops. It’s become fashionable to have geeky tendencies.

So maybe I’m biased (of course I am), but I’m thinking the Geek Divide, being more of an age issue, will resolve itself as the younger generation matures and starts becoming financially independent. These kids are used to putting time and effort into the things they use, they’re willing to endure the pain of the complexity over lack of features that most of us early adopters willingly go through now and they’ll take it for granted that it’s part of the experience. The issues that people have been talking about lately with “commercializing” Web 2.0 offerings will eventually just kind of fade away.

I’m not saying that “commercializing” isn’t important because it is, especially right now. Usability and feature value should always be major factors in the development of applications. Currently, and over the course of the next few years, the Geek Divide will still be a large chasm. But, I think that the level of user sophistication is going to go up radically after that. We’ll just have to be conscious of the needs of the geek-deficient and hold their hands until then.

I’m excited about Microsoft again!

I used to be a total Microsoft advocate. I used to have long debates with people (including my husband) about why Microsoft was not an evil company and why I’d rather be an Microsoft developer than the other choices available. Having worked almost exclusively with Microsoft technologies for 12 years now, I was always impressed with the way they’ve treated developers, and with the quality of tools they provided, with the response to feedback in development and with the technology innovations that seemed to come out at a pace that was invigorating.

But for a while now I have been disappointed with Microsoft (to the point of actually starting to learn things like Ruby on Rails). Vista is delayed and stripped of much of the stuff that was going to make it worth upgrading to in the first place and Live.com doesn’t seem to offer anything groundbreaking or disruptive.

Times have changed and I’ve felt like Microsoft is missing the boat with the internet, moving way too slowly and focusing on the wrong things. The emergence of the not-well defined “Web 2.0″ has ushered in a much faster pace for innovations. New, facinating and useful applications are springing up on the web within mere months of conception and many of them are challenges to Microsoft’s software and general relevance to our “digital lives”. And apparently I’m not the only one who’s feeling this way…

As Nathan Weinberg says:

Basically, everyone, both people working at Microsoft and outsiders, agrees that MS gets outdone by three-person startups that can be more nimble, more reckless and more innovative.

Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft has now caught the clue. I first noticed on Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog:

Simply stated, Microsoft sees that software is increasingly moving to the Web, just as the Web becomes a completely immersive, two way experience for more and more people. With the Internet becoming a major force for the democratization of information, tools, and resources, it’s triggering a revolution in the way that we live our lives. This revolution is dramatically shaping how “we create, share, and refine anything that can be digitally encoded, be it news and information, artistic forms, scientific breakthroughs, personal communications, economic transactions, and, yes, even software,” according to the Live Labs manifesto.

What is the “Live Labs manifesto“? It’s the vision and statement of purpose for Live Labs, Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with the web that’s leaving them behind. I didn’t pay much attention to Live Labs at first because I was underwhelmed with the Live.com offerings so far. But reading Dion’s article and the several others he has linked now has me interested.

Live Labs will be a start-up environment within Microsoft. Seeded with talent from Microsoft Research and MSN, they are also hiring new, fresh talent to bring in ideas from outside the box. Live Labs will intentionally not be using the established methodology and protocols for Microsoft’s internal product development and the focus will be on getting concepts fleshed out and presented for testing (beta releases) and refinement as soon as possible. There will also be some academic grants offered for developing search technologies (assumingly to compete with Google), but I think the “incubation” projects will be more successful.

One thing that I found very intriguing was this statement in the manifesto:

The long-term mission of Live Labs is far more ambitious, may take decades to realize, and necessitates that we extensively partner outside of Microsoft. We wish to generalize the virtuous cycle to the rest of society: empowering people to create in whatever domain they chose, facilitating the exchange of any digital artifact, and cultivating communities of all forms to the benefit of all.

What kind of partnerships outside are they referring to? Non-Microsoft platforms? Open Source projects or languages? W3Consortium or other standards bodies? I wish that there were more details.

Live Labs will be an interesting experiment and I hope that it will be successful. I’m just glad to have something to be excited about again!

Interesting news from Yahoo today:

Yahoo! Inc., one of the first Internet search companies, has capitulated to Google Inc. in the battle for market dominance.

“We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”

While the news itself isn’t very surprising, its refreshing to see Yahoo actually admit publicly what most people already knew. It proves that Yahoo’s managers aren’t quite as dense and self-deluded as lot of big companies management these days and it probably indicates that we’ll be seeing some potentially interesting and disruptive offerings coming from them soon. At the very least, it shows that they’ve realized they need to change their focus, but the effects of that realization have been apparent for a while now with some of the things they’ve debuted in the recent past.

My prediction is still that Yahoo is going to go for any area that’s not under the direct line-of sight for Google’s mission to “collect and organize the world’s information”. And I still think that community and socialware is going to be their saving grace. Now the next concession for search should be coming from MSN… But that’s one article I never expect to see.

I just found a soon to be released piece of hardware that supports my hypothesis that Operating Systems will be irrelevant in a few more years. Lexar is coming out with a new USB drive that will let you install and run your software directly from it using some custom software of its own.

The software, PowerToGo, lets most existing Windows applications run unmodified from the flash drives, Lexar said. The goal is to let users carry their PC environments, including browser settings and instant-messenger clients, in a tiny thumb drive.

…The software will be developed as an open standard, and the Lexar products will be compatible with “most consumer and electronic mobile devices,” according to a company statement.

How cool is that? (more…)

A lot of people have been speculating about what makes a site “Web2.0” and I have been putting together my own conception of it. I think that what is different about Web2.0 sites is not necessarily the content, AJAX, novelty, domain names with dots everywhere, or rounded corners and gradients. Instead, the most successful candidates are (a) extremely supportive of the two main purposes of interacting with the web and (b) incorporate two new factors that don’t exist on pre-Web2.0 sites.

The two behaviors people exhibit when going on-line are either gathering information from or contributing information to the web. Gathering is both searching for information and storing it so that you may find it again later. It is a selfish thing, all about consuming and using info for your own needs. Contributing is about actions such as blogging, participating in forums, commenting, collaborative filtering, and sharing content like photos and videos. It’s all producing and sociality.

I made the suggestion a while ago that Google = Information and Yahoo = Community, but you could also interpret that as Google = Gathering and Yahoo = Contributing. I ran across another Google/Yahoo comparison that implied that gathering and contributing are opposing behaviors and there is even a gender bias for one over the other. In my opinion the gender difference is mainly in which behavior you believe will benefit you the most on a personal level.

But, the behaviors are not exclusive of each other. I believe that they are flip sides of a coin and the best sites support them both at the same time. Useful pre-Web2.0 sites (such as Google and Yahoo) already cater to these behaviors in various degrees, but that’s just not enough. What makes a site Web2.0 is two factors that have really been the catalysts for the changes in our expectations of interaction with a service on the web: Metadata and Portability.

(more…)