The Wave of the Future?

After my last [grumpy] entry about direct marketing, I am posting a brief note on a new technology that marketers should be watching. In Internet time, this is ancient news, since it was unveiled three weeks ago.

At Google I/O at the end of May, one of Google’s development teams showed off a new, but surprisingly mature technology, for creating and managing online conversations. The video of the presentation can be found at http://wave.google.com/, and it’s worth watching (the whole video clocks in at an hour and twenty minutes, but there are some slow parts you can fast-forward through).

At its heart, the technology erases the distinction between such different types of online communication as email, texting, chat, and blogging. Everything is presented as a conversation. A good analogy might be to think of your high school English class: the teacher presents the material and calls on students to answer questions, a conversation that everyone in the class can hear. Yet, some students are also whispering to each other or passing notes. All of this is going on simultaneously, with some parts of the conversation being one- or two-way public discussions, while others are private.

From a technical perspective, the technology is elegant…a very clever, object-oriented encapsulation of conversations and messages.

From a user perspective, it’s equally clever: rather than the proliferation of chat, email, texting, and smartphone clients I need to manage today, I can have all the functionality of these elements rolled into one.

It’s too early to tell whether Google’s specific implementation will go anywhere. This type of technology needs to be able to scale and to attract enough adopters, among both suppliers and consumers, in order to achieve a network effect. But given Google’s resources, their open-source approach, and their experience with massive deployments of online services, there is a reasonable chance that this will be available soon.

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