Comments on: Why is Google doing Google Wave?

By: Clare

Clare — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:14:57 +0000

Ah! I was wondering the same thing as I watched with not small amounts of excitement. I think a couple of things.
First, this has the potential to much further capture attention. My impression is that those of us who want to could run all our web activities entirely from Wave, with it no longer mattering where the recipients of our messages are, as long as developers build the bridges between sites. This will significantly change the landscape – how much time do we spend currently sussing out which are the best platforms where we can get engagement? If they add contextual ads, which I don't see why they wouldn't, then many of us will be there *all the time* instead of anywhere else to see them. I think this will be the real communication junkies rather than everyone else, but they are probably an attractive audience in advertising terms.
Second: business services. This would definitely be a platform that would be cheaper and far, far better than the horrible services some of us are using at the moment.
Third: and I have to confess this crossed my mind while I was trying to get to sleep – they might demonstrate so much value in Waves that it might be a premium service. I suspect they won't, but it might be that we have to consider – are we willing to pay for Wave to have an extremely efficient collaboration service? They may well already have built up enough of an enthusiastic customer base to make some real money on the service.

By: Clare

Clare — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:14:57 +0000