For several years now I’ve been lamenting the fact that social networks have been divorced from web mail. Seems like a natural fit, right? If you’re already logging into a site that knows who your friends are, why not help me keep in touch with those friends beyond the simple “send an email” option?
Some of you may remember that Yahoo has been taking steps to integrate their web mail with social networking (and other daily tasks) for a while now. Facebook wants to add mail to their social network. Google decided to play catch up today and released Google Buzz, as covered really, really, really extensively by TechCrunch and others.
What is Google Buzz? Imagine your Facebook feed interspersed with your email, and that’s pretty much it. When one of your contacts updates her Google status, you’ll see it in your Gmail inbox, and you can comment on it, making it show up in her Gmail inbox again. Adding a little jab at Foursquare, Google will also allow you to geo-tag these status updates, which makes perfect sense if you’re updating from a mobile device.
So it’s fun, it’s cool, but…it’s a couple years too late. Most of us just finished building out our Facebook friends lists, and we have co-workers, classmates, and our parents on it now, so I don’t really need another way to announce my status updates to my contacts. Will I use it? Yeah, occasionally, but I have far more friends on Facebook than I have contacts on Gmail. Not everyone uses Gmail, y’know?
This is not a new concept or a new feature, it’s just a more convenient tool for current Gmail users to keep their friends and family up-to-date. Hopefully TechCrunch will stop flogging this as soon as the “buzz” dies down.
Over the past few months, Yahoo has been quietly adding more and more features to their webmail solution, Yahoo Mail. For three years (from the sidelines), I’ve been hoping they would do this, and finally it looks like they’re getting the message. Perhaps it’s Carol Bartz’ leadership, I don’t know, but Yahoo is finally polishing and rebuilding the biggest weapon in their arsenal.
In the past few months, Yahoo Mail has added support for large attachments (via Drop.io), added various Facebook-like “apps” from companies like Evite, Flickr, and Paypal, and they acquired Xoopit to improve their photo sharing and sending abilities. They even started allowing Facebook style “status casting” which is equivalent to the Facebook news feed, allowing people to keep track of what their friends and family are up to.
These moves show a new, long-overdue dedication to email. Yahoo has 350 million email users worldwide, and they have finally realized that email is their Trojan horse that will let them cross-promote and upgrade users to all of their other media properties and services. Everyone needs email, and very little innovation has happened in the email space in the last 15 years. If Yahoo can innovate and make social networking and messaging readily accessible and imminently usable for their already enormous audience within an email context, they have a chance to create some major buzz and hold off the Facebooks of the world that are out to eat their lunch. Just imagine if Facebook started offering actual email addresses - Yahoo would face a serious threat. Yahoo already has massive reach, all they need to hold off Facebook are tools that let that massive audience connect with each other.
The biggest question I have is whether it is too late. Gmail was integrated with its IM solution from Day 1, but Yahoo Mail still isn’t well tied to Yahoo Messenger. Why weren’t my Yahoo Messenger contacts automatically added to my Mail address book so I can see my friends updates? This is a huge oversight and has hamstrung adoption of the Yahoo news feeds and status updates, but I’m hopeful Yahoo will move to correct this.
Also interesting is that Yahoo is innovating on its email solution while Google is reinventing email entirely with Google Wave. I haven’t had the chance to say this often, but Yahoo’s approach is right, and Google’s is wrong. Google Wave is too innovative, too paradigm shifting to gain widespread adoption in the next few years, and unfortunately it’s the kind of product that isn’t worth anything until the people you’re communicating with use it too. Yahoo, on the other hand, is innovating on email incrementally, making their interfaces more streamlined, and making ancillary features like attachments and photo sharing more native and intuitive. If Yahoo can get the social piece right, too, they may start grabbing headlines with their features again rather than for their deal-making and constant games of executive musical chairs.
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Posted by
joel |
Categories:
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google,
yahoo | Tagged:
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email,
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google wave,
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web mail,
xoopit,
yahoo |
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:
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.
