So I got my Google Wave invite a couple weeks ago. I have been fairly skeptical of all the Wave hype lately, but I was still intrigued and very much looking forward to seeing what it had to offer. I logged in, and…didn’t know what to do. I felt like the first guy in the world to have email - it sounds like a cool idea, but there’s nothing to do until you know other people who have email, too.
Wave allows you to send invites out to 9 friends, so I sent some out. And waited. A week later, finally they started showing up, and I could really see what Wave had in store.
Wave is slick, and pretty, and for the most part fairly easy to start using, but it has too many flaws that will keep it out of the hands of mainstream users and limit its adoption to tech-savvy user groups. My biggest issues with it are:
No email integration. This is supposed to be the communication tool for the next century, but it isn’t backwards compatible with the communication tool(s) for the last century. Surely someone will write an extension to allow it to interface with email, but at that point you’ll lose all the cool Wave features, making the whole exercise moot.
Nothing to do until you know people who have it. Adding an email extension would alleviate this.
Built by programmers, for programmers. As Lifehacker points out, “the first search command every Wave newbie needs to know (is): with:public” which will allow you to see public waves and is very useful when you have no friends using Wave yet. Really guys? Resorting to cryptic command lines in a supposedly mainstream web app? Let me guess, was this documented somewhere in your man pages?
No notifier application. If you’re not in Wave, there’s no way to know you have new Waves waiting for you. There is a third-party app to do this, but it’s annoying that I have to have a notifier for my email and Wave.
Watching people type in real time. Internet “old-timers” will remember that the original tools for instant messaging over the Internet (like “talk”) worked like this. Surprisingly, it’s not much fun to watch other people type and correct their own typos. Really. ICQ and AIM popularized the “wait until they’re done to send the message” model, and no one looked back (until Wave.)
Editing other people’s messages. If I want to collaborate on something with my friends, I’ll tell you. Don’t just let other people edit my messages willy-nilly. It’s fun for a few minutes to edit what your friends said, but threads can quickly become chaotic and impossible to follow. There’s a reason message boards don’t have this feature.
Click for larger image
Un-novative thread presentation. In a giant leap back to 1997, Wavelets are organized by thread first and not by date. This means that responses to any message within the wave get indented directly below that message rather than showing at the bottom of the Wave, so new messages end up located all over the place within the thread. In long threads, you may have to scroll up and down for several pages to find the new messages. For ‘net old-timers, you may remember that many of the first, primitive online forums were arranged like this, but somewhere along the lines everyone discovered that it was easier to follow a conversation by always posting new messages at the bottom and just quoting the message it was in response to. It’s not as elegant from a purist perspective, but it’s much easier for the user to follow.
Replay. The only reasons the Replay feature needs to exist are 1) the flawed thread presentation mentioned above and 2) the fact that anyone on the thread can edit any message. Using replay isn’t fun or interesting - it’s tedious, and it’s there to compensate for unintuitive UI and unnecessary features.
Worst offense: Too many things in one. Wave seemingly tries to replace your email, your IM, and your Google Docs, but doesn’t do a great job on any of them. I much prefer using my IM client to talk to my friends, so I’m not giving that up. Gmail is a better email client, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets are pretty great for collaboration, so I’m not giving those up. (Gmail and Docs already have messaging built-in, and it’s executed rather nicely, btw.) By trying to do so much, it doesn’t do anything well.
I should have known we were in trouble when this was the first line of the “Getting Started” wave: A wave can be both a document and a conversation. For how many users would a statement like this make any kind of sense? For someone like myself, that’s a pretty deep statement and worth some pondering, but how would that help my mom figure out what’s going on?
Wave is truly a technical marvel, and the fact that it works as well as it does is impressive. It’s easy to see why the room full of developers at the Wave unveiling was in awe. But, you must do more than impress developers to build a tool that the mass market will adopt.
Ultimately I think Wave will find some fans within tech-savvy organizations because it could be useful for collaboration and communication in situations where everyone in the company is using it (competing with Yammer), but it won’t gain any significant market penetration compared to email or IM.
I admit it, I’m in love. Joel and Dropbox, sitting in a tree…yadda yadda. I am in love with Dropbox (getdropbox.com). If you’re not familiar with it, Dropbox is a little program that lets you sync a folder on your computer with 1) a drive online in the “cloud” and 2) any number of other PCs you own. You get 2GB of online storage for free, and can pay for more if you want.
With Dropbox, I can plunk files I’m working on into my “My Dropbox” folder, and at the speed of the Internet all my other PCs at home and at work will have that file available. If I delete it off one, it’s gone from all of them. If I accidentally delete it (and clear my PC’s Recycle Bin), I can find the file on the web interface.
One of the coolest features I’ve found is the ability to share folders with others. Here at the office we have a shared Dropbox folder that we can all edit. If I need a file for a presentation, I just put it on the shared folder and it’s available on the conference room computer or on anyone’s else’s PC in the building. It’s like having a file server, but much, much easier.
A related program that I’ve been using religiously is Sugarsync. Sugarsync works in much the same way as Dropbox, but it allows you to sync multiple, existing folders on your PC. I’ve set it up so I have my “Music”, “Pictures”, “Videos”, and “Documents” folders all sync’ed separately, so I can choose which folders to sync to which PCs - for instance, I don’t need to have all my media on my work PC, so I only sync my Documents folder to it. If I need a video or picture, I can always download it from the Sugarsync website. I upgraded my Sugarsync to the 100GB plan so I can sync every file I have to the remote server. Awesome benefit of doing this - no need to do backups anymore. I can get my files on any of my PCs, and I don’t have to backup any of them. Computing nirvana! (Yeah, I’m a geek.)
The only thing I’ve had trouble with on SS is when you delete large numbers of files - SS puts these into a Recycle Bin of their own, and those files contribute to your storage quota. I once deleted 30GB of files just to move them somewhere else, and I went over my quota because those files were still in the online Recycle Bin. And, unfortunately, there’s no “Empty Recycle Bin” feature…hopefully they will address this soon. UPDATE: Sugarsync contacted me after this blog post, and let me know that: “In the desktop client, you can right click on the Deleted Items folder and select Empty Deleted Files.”
So currently I use Dropbox for the small number of files I need to work on all the time or just for transferring files between computers, and Sugarsync for my comprehensive file backup and sync solution, and it’s been working great. I don’t worry about PCs crashing or accidentally wiping my hard drives anymore. Let me tell you, it’s a very freeing feeling for those of us paranoid about losing years of our digital history. Kudos to the product folks at both companies, and I’m sure both will do well.
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, guys - honestly, there just haven’t been a lot of interesting developments in the digital media area lately. So, I’ll just tackle a few smaller topics today.
Pointless Twittering: According to a study by Pear Analytics, 40% of Tweets are “Pointless Babble” with another 38% being “Conversational” (which I suppose is a step above Pointless Babble. A small step.) Only 3.6% of posts were classified as news, confirming my assertion that Twitter is more of a communication tool than a source of information. If you’re in the market for pointless babble or conversation, now you know where to go. On a side note, I love the use of the term “pointless babble” in serious research.
Celeb name power: The social media press should stop talking about Hunch.com just because it was started by a Flickr founder. It’s not interesting and it’s not (as the press keeps calling it) social Q&A; it’s social polling, more akin to Sodahead or even the old-school Coolquiz than Yahoo! Answers or my baby. With social Q&A you get to ask a question any way you want and let other people answer your question. On Hunch, you can’t ask a question at all - you have to search for decision-making wizards that other users have already created. And even then, it’s only good for making decisionslike whether you should mow your lawn or whether you should renew your World of Warcraft subscription. If you want to know why the sky is blue or what sights to see in Istanbul, you’re out of luck. Yawn. The initial burst of traffic they got from the press is fading, although not as precipitously as Wolfram Alpha’s.
Dumb, smart!: Radio Shack is smart to try rebranding as The Shack because they have nothing to lose. Their old brand stands for irritable, aggressive salespeople, batteries, and out-of-date, no-name electronics devices, so they could stand to shed some of that. Pizza Hut, on the other hand, is nuts to drop the ‘Pizza’ and call themselves The Hut. They will forever be associated with Jabba, and there was nothing terribly wrong with their brand as it was. The Hut says they changed the name to allow them to broaden their menu, but I say if Burger King can sell salads, you guys can sell just about anything short of sushi. Don’t get me started on Syfy.
Microyawn: I suppose the whole Yahoo-Microsoft deal is big news, but for the average web user, it just won’t mean anything. Yahoo search results will look different. Big deal.
Wake me when Google Wave comes out. It’s way too overblown to gain any mass-market acceptance, but at least it’ll be a fun toy for tech geeks like myself.
Morgan Stanley today, in a fit of “we can do no wrong”-ness, posted a “research” report discussing the behavior of today’s teens regarding media. The only problem was that their research was based on talking to a single 15 year-old intern at Morgan Stanley. That’s right, they talked to one random dude. While normally this sort of interview would be fodder for a high school newspaper, Morgan Stanley continued their quest for irrelvance by publishing it themselves.
Because the report is generally so useless, I will not be posting a link to it. However, nothing stopped Mashable and CrunchGear/TechCrunch from posting their own coverage, including a full list of the conclusions reached by said 15 year-old. Mashable had the sense to at least question the research, but TC went ahead and used one of these useless conclusions as their headline (talk about link-baiting):
Morgan Stanley report shows that teens don’t use Twitter, don’t buy music (but still go to the movies)
in reality neither site should have said anything about this worthless report and they definitely should not have posted the conclusions. Guys: if it isn’t news, don’t cover it.
It’s always fun to see a trailblazing product get announced and then watch the press run around trying to figure out what it is, what it means, and why it’s important. The latest occasion for this kind of tomfoolery is Google’s announcement yesterday of the Chrome OS. Here’s my take on it:
What it is
Chrome OS is the Chrome browser plus a version of Linux that is built to run a single application: the Chrome browser. The “applications” that run on Chrome OS are what we have traditionally thought of as web sites, pages, or services, things like Google, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Delicious, or pretty much anything else that starts with http. These include services like Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets.
What it isn’t
A traditional operating system. You can’t install Photohop, MS Office, iTunes, Yahoo messenger, AIM, or any other OS-based application you’re used to. If you want to play MP3s, you’ll have to find a site or service that will do that like Pandora or Orb. If you want to IM, you’ll need a web-based IM like Meebo. If you want to edit pictures, you’ll need a web-based photo editor like Aviary’s Phoenix.
What we don’t know
It’s unclear if Google will build hooks into Chrome to allow it to manipulate local files.
It’s also unclear how much access web applications would have to peripherals. I don’t know if I can just plug it into an iPod, webcam, or external hard drive and have it work. Google claims that Chrome apps would run on any standards compliant browser, and that functionality just isn’t part of the current browser model, so I’m guessing these peripherals would not work.
What it means
Chrome OS, at release, will be built primarily for netbooks. It will let you boot the netbook quickly and browse the web within seconds. It’s good for people who want access to the web anywhere and aren’t doing heavy-duty computing like hardcore PC games, Photoshop, or even complex Excel spreadhseets or Powerpoint presentations. It definitely isn’t going to be useful as a media center.
A netbook with Chrome OS is what used to be known as a thin client or a Network Computer, but with real graphics capabilities. It’s meant for mobile computing, and it will only threaten Microsoft’s Windows OS in the ultra-portable netbook space for the foreseeable future. Windows 7 need not worry.
As for the press’ coverage, it’s largely regurgitations of the Google Press Release with a dash of analysis and a double helping of “maybe it’ll be important…you decide.” But then…we have TechCrunch, which is getting harder and harder to describe as a “news outlet.”
Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows.
Not true at all. As Google made clear in their latest announcement, Chrome OS will still require Linux as the traditional OS it runs on top of. He goes on to grandly pronounce
Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs.
Firstly, the browser still needs Linux, and let’s not forget our history - the pioneers of computing have been talking about the thin client since 1993 and the similar Network Computer since 1996, both of which follow the same model as the Google OS, so he wasn’t exactly going out on a limb there. Why he felt the need to brag about his tardy prediction again today, I can’t say.
Certainly there are still questions to be answered about Chrome OS and I don’t think it will be a game changer in the next couple years, but it is a step forward in making mobile computing cheaper and more convenient. We’ll still need our PC’s with real OS’s to do real work, but this could indeed take a big bite out MS’s dominance in the low-end PC market, particularly when wireless data plans become more affordable. Of course, don’t expect MS to be silent - they’re working on their own browser-based OS as well.
Let’s be dispassionate. Before yesterday’s announcement: 1. Chrome ran on Linux. 2. Linux was an operating system. 3. Linux ran on netbooks. However, most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it’s still true today.
I think this is mostly accurate, but I think Google is trying to create a different class of device that is actually different from today’s netbooks and therefore, it isn’t a question of Linux vs. XP. A Chrome netbook will boot directly to a browser window, and everyone knows how to use a browser, so it avoids the typical Linux geekiness. The fact that it only runs a browser clearly makes it much less feature rich than XP, but it’s also much faster and cheaper. Maybe it needs a new name to signify its limited abilities - micro netbook or browserbook or something…but I agree with Dave that calling this an OS is really just a marketing maneuver.
In a recent post on his blog Mr. Magazine, Samir Husni discusses the recent trend of magazines producing a single issue with two different covers, one cover for placement in newsstands, and a different cover for their subscribers. It seems that for distribution on newsstands, the covers were more sensational and sexy, with more lists (8 reasons your diet isn’t working) and more lascivious content (”The Sex of your Dreams (& Hers.)”) Notable magazines using this technique are Men’s Health, US Weekly, and Bazaar.
What surprised me about the article was Husni’s dramatic objection to the practice:
I do not believe that the single copy cover should be any different than that of the subscriber, if we are in the business of customers who count and not just counting customers. Subscribers do visit the newsstands and what they see their should match what is on their coffee table.
Husni doesn’t seem to give any reasoning for his assertions; he just thinks this is the way it “should” be. The way I see it, if you’re not just “counting customers” and you actually think your customers count, why not give them an experience they want? If you know that most people in a certain segment have a certain preference and you have the ability to cater to that preference, why wouldn’t you? Naturally, newsstand issues need to be more marketing oriented, so the headlines should be more attention-grabbing. If someone wants to put a magazine on their coffee table, they many not want lewd headlines about sex tips all over it. So why wouldn’t you give your readers what they want?
I applaud the magazine industry for this step in the right direction. Websites have been delivering customized experiences for years, so it’s about time that magazines took a page from our…book?
The internet publishing industry did itself a serious disservice when first designing ads for the web. Rather than learning from the newspaper and magazine industries, they reinvented the wheel by designing ads that were as unobtrusive as possible, and they’ve been paying for it ever since.
Remember the first standardized ad size? It was 468×60, an amazingly small ad unit by today’s standards. You just can’t fit a meaningful message on an ad this size (especially with today’s larger screen resolutions), and to compensate ad sizes have been creeping upwards over time…from the original 468×60 and 125×125 to
250×250 to
I say it’s about time we started showing huge ads. We online publishers have been limiting our success for years, ever since that first tiny ad size was standardized.
To see why this is the case, look at print magazines. Those guys have huge ads. One of the most common units they sell is a full page! They sell full pages, half pages, quarter pages with the smaller eighth- and sixteenth-page ads getting either shoved to the back of the magazine or spanning several pages so they can tell a story. Certainly it is true that the print mag industry is hurting these days, but that pain is because of rising printing and distribution costs and an oversaturated market, not because of their advertising model.
Only now are we online publishers finally seeing ad standards that are competitive with the print mag standards (One could argue that interstitials are full page ads, but most don’t take up anywhere near the whole page.) TechCrunch whines childishly about these big ads having a poor user experience, but I posit that TechCrunch’s alternative of a superabundance of small ads create an even worse user experience than one or two large ads would. TC shows ELEVEN ads before you even get below the fold, 10 of which are deprecated 125×125’s that allow for virtually no design, messaging or branding benefits, and they make the whole page look messy and cluttered.
Large ads are simply better because:
There is more room for compelling design
There is more room for compelling messaging
Page layout is easier - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen page designs compromised by trying to fit a 300×250 ad. Interstitials and full page-wide ads are actually easier to design around
When will web ads be this cool? When they're big enough
Print mags have much larger ads than websites, so do they have a poor user experience? Of course not. In many magazines the ads are so cool that they’re almost considered content. Magazine readers realize that you need to see ads to get cheap/free content, and website readers only whine about big ads on websites because:
We have conditioned them to see small ads
Online ad creative is often poorly designed (not visually appealing, message isn’t compelling, etc.), and
Online ads are often poorly targeted
We have been trying to fix the Problem 1 for 15 years, and once we do fix it, the advertising folks will fix Problem 2 for us because they’ll have much more space to work with, as they do in print mags. As for targeting (Problem 3), AdSense was the biggest quantum leap in this space, with behavioral targeting being the next wave; there is plenty of work going on in this area.
As soon as online publishers and advertisers can fix these problems, user experience will improve, ad rates will improve, and we will finally see the maturing of the online advertising model.
In what alternate universe does a service that after just over two years in existence already has a 22 percent market share count as something that has yet to catch on? This is exactly what happens when market researchers trained in the 60’s are allowed to research things they don’t understand. Any new online service would be thrilled to have a 22% market share of Gen Y, particularly a service that requires them to actually post content publicly to participate, rather than consuming content or having private conversations as they do on most social networks.
PMN is showing that they are hopelessly out of touch by positioning Twitter against the entire social networking space at large - it’s like saying “90% of adults 18-24 have cars, but only 20% are Toyota - Toyota has yet to catch on!” Yet again I am severely disappointed by market researchers, as well as the press who mindlessly regurgitate these releases.
Google today announced the impending release of their new…product, Google Wave. I hesitate when describing it, because it’s actually pretty tough to categorize. Techcrunch has a thorough writeup of the functionality and Mashable has a brief of their own, but neither does much analysis, so let me try to summarize.
Google Wave is:
Like email, but won’t work (navtively) with existing email
Like IM, but it isn’t an application
Like Facebook messaging, but without Facebook
Like Facebook’s application platform, but without Facebook
Like Twitter, but without a public-facing feed
Like IRC, but less temporal
Does that help? Maybe not.
Let me try to sum it up in a positioning statement that I’m making up based on the proposed featureset:
Google Wave is a web-based messaging system that helps people communicate, share, and collaborate with friends, family, and business contacts both in real-time and asynchronously.
If we look at it in these terms, Google Wave is not only extremely ambitious but is also set squarely against Facebook.
You may consider this comparison invalid because Google Wave has so many features that Facebook doesn’t and Facebook has a ton of features that Wave doesn’t, but users don’t look at features, they look at problems the product solves for them. Is it filling a need that isn’t met right now, or is it filling the need better than existing services? It’s unlikely that people would give up Facebook for Wave, so the question for Google comes down to: will they use both? You can ask the same question about Wave vs. email, IM, and Twitter.
In order to think Wave will be successful, you have to think the problems it solves are important. Here are some of the problems it purports to address:
It’s hard to communicate and collaborate with friends over email / IM / other web services
There are too many ways to communicate with people online - I want a single method
Email, IM, and online messaging don’t allow collaboration, and allow limited use of multimedia
Email is not a dynamic communication mechanism
It’s hard to share my email conversations with people who aren’t in the conversation
This is just a start of what they want it to do. One of the creators, Lars, said of Wave,
“My vision is to have the one communication tool. I want all the use cases to be covered. We made up ideas of what Wave could be used for — negotiating contracts, writing articles. Lots of things.”
Is it trying to do too much? Very likely.
I fear that Wave breaks one of Google’s own product development tenets: fail often, fail early (or maybe fail early, fail often, I don’t remember, but I know there was a lot of failing involved.) This project has been in development since 2007 and has 50 developers working on it, and it already has a plethora of what we product managers call “would-be-nice” features. I encourage Google to make sure the core features work and release this thing as soon as possible to see if people like it at all. If they like it, THEN add the silly extras like real-time wiki-style collaborative editing that lets you see what other people type as they type it.
I do like the concept behind Wave in how it aims to unify communication, but I want to see that happen in a way that simplifies my life. Read through the comments on the TechCrunch article, and you’ll see that most people think it looks too complicated. As a contrast, no one who saw the iPod or iPhone unveilings thought either device would complicate their lives - they are both beautiful in their simplicity, and that’s why they sell by the boatloads. Google will have an uphill battle marketing this product until they can show an average user how it will simplify their lives. If they clear this hurdle, Facebook needs to watch out.
My name is Joel Downs, and I've been working in social media and online product management since 1994. In a former life, I founded Answerbag.com, one of the top 3 social Q&A sites on the web, and Gamers.com.
Formation Media is my current project My resume My RSS feed My twitter
So I got my Google Wave invite a couple weeks ago. I have been fairly skeptical of all the Wave hype lately, but I was still intrigued and very much looking forward to seeing what it had to offer. I logged in, and…didn’t know what to do. I felt like the first guy in the world to have email - it sounds like a cool idea, but there’s nothing to do until you know other people who have email, too.
