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.

A lot of people seem to be wondering about the wisdom of Google buying YouTube with it’s legal problems and how it potentially competes with Google Video but I think those two issues are relatively irrelevant from Google’s perpective. The acquisition of YouTube doesn’t surprise me too much, mainly because YouTube is the prime place on the web where people are uploading video content. It doesn’t really matter that a lot of that material is copyrighted because bringing YouTube into Google’s holdings as a premier content collector fits in very nicely with Google’s mission:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Everything Google does, especially the stuff that makes people scratch their heads, ultimately falls back to that statement. This is something people need to realize and something I’ve noticed for a while now. Think about it: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information…” They want it all.

What’s the best way to get it all? Make yourself the gatekeeper. Supply the best (or buy the best) tools to create content or collect content and people will gladly support you in your mission. Google Pages, Base, Spreadsheets, Notebook, Calendar, even GMail are all about letting you create content on Google’s servers. And they buy tools like Writely (now “Google Docs“) and SketchUp because, again, it’s a way for you to create content directly on their servers. If they can get you to create content on their servers then it makes it infinitely easy for them to slice, dice and organize that information however they want. And if they can’t get you to create content for them, then the next best thing is to be the biggest archive holder (enter YouTube).

What most people think Google is about, namely search, is just a means to the end of their mission. Possibly even a secondary means, if you step back and look at the big picture.

Why is it so important to organize all the world’s information? We all know that information is power. If you can put yourself in the position of being a gatekeeper of all information, being a portal, being an oracle, then you’ve got an extreme of influence over the world. People potentially become dependant on you for their lives to work smoothly and you become indispensable. What company wouldn’t want to be in that position?

I like Google, mainly because I drink the kool-aid about how cool and useful the tools they provide me with are. I use them every day and yes, I am very dependant on them. But every now and then I hear the little voice in the back of my head whispering that I hope they uphold their motto “Don’t be evil.” as fervently as they seem to be pursuing their mission. The rest of the time I just sit back and admire the genius of it all.

Yay for Google! They’ve got another winner. I’ve been playing with GCal all morning and I’m pretty impressed. There’s still some room for improvement, of course, but Google has fixed one of my main peeves with 30Boxes: setting up repeating events and altering a single instance or the entire series is easy!

What I like:

• Creating calendars for different aspects of your life is easy
• Setting permissions on those calendars (and events) at different levels is fairly easy
• Typing in some keywords in the title when creating an event automatically populates some fields (similar to 30Boxes) such as when I type in “Weekend trip with friends in Sedona”, Sedona gets placed in the Location field for me. That’s nice.
• You have an Agenda view of your dates which is like a list of all most recent upcoming events on your calendars. This alternate view is nice and very useful for forecasting availability over more than one month or viewing annual events (like on your Birthdays calendar).
• Showing and hiding the different calendars is just a matter of a click, and this comes in handy especially for the Agenda view.
• Being able to share calendars with select people and give them rights to manage the calendar entries as well is a wonderful feature
• Duplicating events between calendars is just two clicks
• There is a URL based API you can use on your blog/website to create events with one click, so that you can publish an event that other people can instantly add to their own calendars.
• You can set up reminders to be sent in advance of events, selecting time periods from 10 minutes to 1 week, and the reminders can be sent as email, SMS to your mobile phone or as a popup window (assuming you have GCal open on your desktop).

What needs improvement:

• There’s no html view of your public calendars (to non Google users).
• Finding other people’s public calendars is not easy or intuitive… I still haven’t figured out how to do it without having the url for the calendar’s RSS feed
• There’s no integration with GMail even though the help says there is… this may be a timing issue as they roll updates out to the various Google servers
• There’s no integration with the Contacts in GMail… most of my events revolve around people I know so I would like to see those connections between my contacts and events
• There needs to be a way to add TODO list type functionality to this. So the tasks can show up on your Agenda, but not necessarily be bound to a hard completion date
• There needs to be a way to “share” an event between two calendars instead of just “duplicating” it, so that if you change the event it gets updated on all the calendars that reference it
• There should be a programmatic API for adding calendar entries to public calendars or calendars that are shared with you. For instance, to allow people to come to your blog and propose a date for a meeting or other event and have it posted to your public calendar for your site. Basically the opposite of the way the published event button works now.
• There should be a way to set up more than one reminder for an event, such as for a birthday, to get a reminder at 2 weeks from the day and another at a week, just to make sure that you actually get a present in time!
• You should also be able to set up the delivery type for each reminder. Currently you set that at a global level, but I’d rather set it so that each reminder might be delivered differently (mainly split by the period of time…).

What’s ripe for 3rd parties:

(put on your developer hat!)

• An HTML view of your public calendars. Someone out there will build this soon, I’m sure.
• Wordpress/TypePad/Blogger widgets to incorporate your calendar
• A manager to sync your events to and from GCal other services like Eventful, Trumba, and even 30Boxes.
• An Outlook add-in that automatically (or easily) publishes your events to GCal

Overall, it’s a great start and it’s going to be a lot of competition for some of the other options out there. Even with the issues I mentioned, I’m still pretty excited about what I’ve seen so far. I can’t wait to see what they do with it next.

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.

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.

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