Perhaps these have been the same people who’ve declared Google+ a failure over and over again. Even the fastest growing social network is not enough in a world that has Facebook. And even if there would be tens of millions of registered users for the service already after a few months, at least they weren’t using this “ghost town” of a network (see the discussion around #aavekaupunki in Finnish). Yeah, it can only be a failed attempt from the Mountain View engineers to build a Facebook clone, since that is the gold standard of social networking that every other contender must be evaluated against.

To all those people surprised about the launch of Google “Search Plus Your World” with integration to Google+ profiles, circles and posts, I’d like to present the following question: did you think for a moment that Google was not going to leverage it’s core competence (search) in the social network it was building? Vice versa, was it not blatantly obvious right from the start that the company would utilize this new social data source it has unlimited access to (G+) for improving the relevancy of search results?

Ok, enough of the “my network is better than your network” wars. For the end user there’s precious little significance in which US based company is luring in the biggest number of status updates per second. What we ultimately want is for the creation, sharing, discovery and consumption of relevant information to be as convenient as possible, so the question is: what can I get out of a social search engine that wasn’t possible before?

Yesterday I came across a brilliant presentation from Jeff Atwood (behind Coding Horror and more notably Stack Overflow), which contained this quote from Clay Shirky:

Work is when your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid.

work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid.

It was late Sunday evening and I had happily spent a good number of hours reading work related articles on my free time and loving every moment of it. The though of the looming Monday morning and returning back to mundane Work tasks made the concept strike a nerve and I decided I wanted to post it on a social network, as people generally do nowadays in such situations. I went googling for the source of the quote, to get a link that would be shareable (yes, it is a word). This is what I received:

It turns out I had actually already posted an article referencing the very same speech 11 months ago, only I didn’t have any recollection of it. It was on my Posterous “blog” that I’ve used mainly as a public noteboard of interesting articles I come across regarding knowledge work. Due to the ultimate simplicity of Posterous, it’s very quick to compose an email with quotes, images & links, send it to the Posterous email address  and see it turn into a blog post, which is why you don’t need to spend much time thinking about the topic itself. A noteboard is only useful if you know to go and read its content, which is what I didn’t know. But Google did.

Ok, the result in the example is most likely taken from a tweet rather than a Google+ post, since that didn’t exist last February yet. The point is not really about Google+ itself, rather it serves as yet another reminder that the web knows you better than you do. Instead of being frightened of the privacy implications, what I would recommend everyone to do is to make the most of it – exploit the intelligence of the machine that we’ve all helped to build.

Related artists. Who to follow. Recommendations based on your browsing history. The Web has to be working for us, not the other way around.

— Jukka Niiranen (@jukkan) January 5, 2012

For example: in a world of personalized search, is there any longer a need for social bookmarking á la Delicious? Why should I bother saving links into my own list on a separate point solution like Delicious, when I might as well share the link to my followers/circles/friends/whatever and trust that the system will bring it up if I ever need it again? Trying to come up with descriptive tags for links all on my own seems like a futile attempt compared to the power that the networked online society can have on building relevancy for the shared content.

To continue on the thoughts expressed by Shirky, sharing is work, but not Work, as it feels inherently like the right thing to do and requires effort, yet you don’t get paid for it. “Big Work drives the economy, little work drives the Internet.” It took around 100 million hours to create all of the content on Wikipedia, but thanks to the evolutionary nature of social technology and the network effect, the next Wikipedia will most likely take only a fraction of those hours. It has to, and we really shouldn’t settle for anything less. It is therefore imperative that the tools being built by companies operating in the realm of IT, be it the Google Goliaths or the start-up Davids, strive to make the most of what the collective little work of the online population has already built, because that is the best way to foster motivation of workers (with a lowercase w). This motivation, in turn, will be more and more in demand as the human civilization is facing problems that its capitalist system is not very good at solving. The little work can go a long way.

As what comes to the search engine business that built Google / Google built (any which way you want to look at it), we’ve already seen signs that indexed search has peaked. The way we used to search for content is on the decline, and if Google would be sticking to what they do best now, fighting against the next big thing, they would be standing on the deck of a sinking ship. You could well blame them of being hopelessly late to the game of social, but based on what I’ve seen from them during the past year, I wouldn’t count them out just yet. The reason is, I believe we don’t yet have nearly enough tools for social technology to make us as smart as we could be.

Right now we have the infrastructure  in place for networking with people and sharing content. That’s a good start and it’s been a big enough revolution on its own to fuel the stellar rise of services like Facebook and Twitter. However, if we’d just continue on the same path of ever increasing tweet counts, would we end up becoming increasingly smart or rather end up in the lunatic asylum? If we look at the content search functionality offered by Twitter (basic keyword search on less than a week’s worth of data) or Facebook (absolutely none!), it’s easy to see that the game has only just begun on developing content relevance and discovery algorithms that deliver real added value over simply consuming an ever growing feed of data. While social media has brought us new strategies to overcome information overload through relying on recommendations and content sharing  by people we know/trust, this won’t scale indefinitely, and it is in fact quickly contributing to the very problem it once promised to solve.

In order for us to keep getting smarter through social networks, the filters available to us will need to get smarter first. The question is: can Google produce the missing UI needed for harnessing the true power of social networks? And if not Google, then who?

Nowhere else is mobility more central than when travelling abroad, away from your familiar services and surroundings. It would therefore be perfectly natural to assume that the traveller segment would be the one that mobile service providers would be actively looking to cater for. Yet the reality is completely the opposite: mobile operators are making sure that no sane person uses mobile data while travelling abroad, thanks to the ridiculous prices of data roaming.

Going on the road? Let’s burn the books & switch off

Last week I was travelling in Macedonia, a potential candidate for becoming an EU member. An exotic location to some extent, as I hadn’t been to any of the former Yugoslavia countries, but at the same time not too distant from the average central European culture. Skopje, their capital city, is not exactly on the top 20 list of cities for tourists to visit, so there wasn’t any paper guidebooks available to take with me. I did download the Skopje In Your Pocket guidebook into my Kindle, but the painful rendering of PDF magazines on the small black & white ePaper screen meant I hardly opened the document. Instead I decided to try and rely on content that I could use on my HTC Desire HD.

The price for mobile data use in Macedonia was according to my Finnish operator’s (DNA) pages a bit over 10 euros per megabyte. Ok, so the first thing to do before boarding the plane was to disable all APN information to make sure that zero bytes would be transferred over the mobile operators’ networks. Hey, what else is new?

A key criteria in selecting our hotel in Skopje had been the availability and visitor ratings on free WiFi connectivity. Even if there was to be no hotspots discovered while out on the town, at least the hotel would serve as a home base for downloading information on sights to see and pubs to visit. In preparation for the times without a network, I had installed the Maps(-) app from Androind Market and downloaded offline Google maps data of the city.

Fortunately it was not too difficult to discover open, free WiFi networks while walking in the center of Skopje. Cafes and shopping centers tended to frequently have a network of decent quality. Outdoor signs of a free T-Mobile hotspot being available to the customers made selecting the restaurants quite a bit easier.

(Non-)Economics of data roaming

During the 3 day visit I ranked up in total 300 MB of data transfer over WiFi. While I did frequently perform Google searches, check into Foursquare (and of course Untappd while going round the pubs!), browse FB/Twitter streams etc., none of the use was particularly data intensive. No video or audio transmitter, just your everyday transactions with applications that have become a part of my daily routine.

How much would have all this mobile data connectivity cost if I had stayed APN enabled and used the 3G network provided by the local telecom operator? Over 3000 euros. Wow. That’s ten times more than what I paid for the flights and hotel altogether. I could have travelled around the world with that money.

How much did I end up paying for the mobile data connectivity while travelling in Macedonia? Zero euros. That’s right, the local economy received more of my money through bubblegum purchases than through offering me telecommunications services.

How much value did I receive from having a mobile device with Internet connection available to me during my travels? Quite a lot, and I expect that value only to increase in the future when the apps and databases available become even more useful. Would I have been willing to pay something for the convenience of not having to hunt for hotspots and just rely on an always-on 3G data connection. Of course I would have!

So, what was your business again?

Call it what you want and reason it how ever which way you like, but in my eyes the continuing state of data roaming pricing in Europe (and of course globally in most places) deserves to be labeled as pure insanity. Insanity particularly therefore that the operators are continuing to do the same thing (preserving an ancient “per MB” pricing model) and expect different results (more revenue from mobile application users).

When debating over the right price point for mobile data plans, the operators all around the world are nowadays trying to claim they can’t offer “all you can eat” pricing anymore due to the increase of smartphones and the lack of 3G/4G network capacity. While there may be a hint of truth in that, it’s important to remember this doesn’t in any way justify the exorbitant pricing of data roaming. Foreign users are at any given time and location going to represent only a fraction of the total user volume for an operator. All the investments needed are in the billing systems and agreements between operators.

The real leasson from this sad situation is that in order to make money through service innovations you don’t necessarily need any new technology. The technology for providing effortless mobile Internet connectivity to tourists has already been built and paid for. Nothing is missing, except offering the service in the form of a feasible product. At the same time, the Internet (as a conscious entity, in the vain of Skynet, Google et al) is working its way around this lack of operator products by making it increasingly easy for local entrepreneurs to punch holes into this firewall by setting up open WiFi hotspots. These holes provide connections to the backbone network of mostly the very same operators and allow the tasty app juice of our post-PC era cloud applications to flow into the mobile devices of vigilant vistors.

Everywhere you go, the cloud follows

Ok, so you may not always have high quality connection to the web, meaning you can’t rely on it to be always there to answer your questions, but the same goes for 3G connections as well. GPRS is in many ways equal to “no connection”, at least when you consume on average 100 MB of data per day. Once you do have a working connection, the big clouds are all there for you to reach into, with their unlimited and ever evolving means of communication and information discovery.

It’s good to note that not even the ancient technology of SMS was reliable enough to be transmitted between Finland and Macedonia, as many messages were delayed or remained missing. At the same time, whenever I had access to Gmail or Facebook I was able to utilize their full feature set as if I had been sitting at home, typing on my laptop. In short, there wasn’t anything that I wanted to do but was unable to do when equipped with my Android smartphone instead of lugging around a mini-PC.

Feel free to disagree, but to me that is a sure sign of the coming post-PC era where both the traditional telecom operator services such as phone calls & text messages as well as traditional keyboard + mouse + monitor + CD-ROM computing paradigms are in danger of slowly becoming extinct. I won’t be living without a “PC” or leave home without a “phone”, but I’ll care less and less about services built specifically around those old conceptual silos. I will just replace them with “everything”, which means anyone can provide services for them.

Waisting more of our time while connected

As a final note, during the trip I was once again reminded of the fact that Google couldn’t make social applications if its life depended on it (and pretty soon it does). Mr. Scobleizer wrote a great post on the topic of how the best applications are the ones that enable us to waste our time more efficiently. That’s exactly the kinds of mobile apps that you need while travelling in a foreign country.

Google Places turned out to be in practice almost useless, while Foursquare actually provided quite satisfactory results most of the time. Particularly the new Explore tab in their mobile application provided a convenient stream of relevant information to a visitor in a foreign country. If only the Macedonian people would have submitted their comments in English, since the local cyrillic alphabet makes it impossible to even make guesses about what the text might mean…

Anyway, I though I’d highlight a few examples of a more recent trend that’s becoming visible in the world of social web. It’s always been about telling the apps what you are doing, thinking or liking, where about and how. Now, after feeding the networks with data about yourself, they are gradually becoming smart enough to tell you what you are like.

Where Do You Go?

Foursquare is not new, but here ‘s a very quick recap: you pull out your mobile phone, launch the app and see what venues are close to you (based on mobile network location data, or GPS for the hifi geeks). You click to check-in to the place you are currently. The end.

Ok, so of course you can also view where your friends have been checking in to. That is, if any of them would be similar gadget geeks like you. I’m pretty sure eventually the location information will become a natural part of the social fabric (waiting for FB Places to arrive here in Finland), but as of now, in reality it isn’t for everyone yet.

What can you get from the location data then? For example, this heatmap of where I’ve been checking in around the city of Helsinki. Sure, I don’t spend all my time with a finger on the check-in button, nor do the public venues available on the service give an accurate view of where I spend my time. Still, it would be foolish to say that the heatmap doesn’t give me insight on the locations that are a part of my ‘graph in the geographic sense. With enough data and the right presentation method, casual transactions can start to accumulate a whole new value added.

Take a trip down Memolane

Pretty much every social app has a timeline view of some kind, similar to the FB wall. It’s sort of a divider between generations of applications, as many of the oldskool software and business applicatios are perfectly happy with asking you the user to punch in more and more data without trying to present it back to the users in any aggregated “what’s been happening lately” view. Another common dilemma is that it’s hard if not impossible to automatically combine data from different applications. That’s how bad life used to be only a few years ago.

Integration in the cloud is as easy as OAuth (open authorization), so in a matter of a few clicks you can be connecting the various dots fragmented around your networks into a single stream of information about yourself. Now all there’s left to do is to put a nice timeline UI on top of the data and you’ve got Memolane. Your tweets, check-ins, FB posts, Last.fm scrobbles and everything else in a chronological order that allows you to travel back in time and reminisce about what you did last summer. Yes, again the web knows what you’ve long since forgotten in your selective human brain.

Get Glue’d to the media around you

Apps on top of apps – that’s the future we’re already living in. Why keep on re-inventing the wheel when you could be focusing on designing the rest of the vehicle instead?

Back when Last.fm launched their audioscrobbler app in 2003 the concept of sharing playlist data right from your WinAmp in real time to a web-based service was very novel. Keep in mind, this was waaaay before social networks made sharing and liking and retweeting something that’s considered an everyday activity. I kept on accumulating information their database on a regular basis, then stopped using them, then returned back to an active user thanks to their integration with Spotify.

The concept of scrobbling remains cool, but in this day & age there are people out there who cannot be satisfied by merely sharing what track they are listening to. Enter GetGlue. What they’ve built is an almost universal system for checking in to things. Books, movies,TV shows, games, gadgets, restaurants etc. By installing an add-on for your browser and browsing one of hundreds of supported sites that GetGlue recognizes as having content items that their database tracks, you’ll see a toolbar at the bottom of the window. The toolbar not only allow you to like/unlike/favorite/saveforlater or share to FB/Twitter, but it also shows who else has been liking the content in question + recommendations of what else you might like, based on the user data similarity.

Sitting home alone on your sofa and watching Dexter doesn’t have to be unsocial time anymore. Reach for your smartphone, launch the GetGlue app and do a check-in. You’ll see who else has checked into the same show, so you can go and spy their profile to see where their remote has taken them next. While at it, why not do a check-in to that bottle of wine you’ve been sipping? Come on, you’ll get badges as a reward as well!

OMG, where’s my privacy?!?

The first reaction from a casual web surfer on all of the new ways in which you can expose yourself to the world will surely be a cry for privacy. Isn’t this the kind of a surveilance society that George Orwell warned us about by writing the 1984? Only it’s worse, since the innocent web surfers have been brainwashed to report back to big brother seemingly on their own free will, just by giving them pictures of digital badges! Someone please stop this insanity!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret that explains why the situation is not quite that grim at all:

The web knows you because we are the web.

Back in the 90′s, the world wide web was born as a network of documents. Today it is a network of people. Small but profound difference. While it is still perfectly possible for anyone to choose to use the web as a big document management system and just passively consume content that is published there by large organizations and media entities, there is an increasing amount of benefits to be gained by being an active participant instead. Once you cross that line, you start to exist in the web. It may be behind a number of aliases and alter egos, or it may be with your real name and identity (probably both). You may exist in different forms and footprints to anonymous surfers, identified users and verified friends or co-workers. Nevertheless, your actions become a small but integrated part of the fabric of web. Just like you’re a tiny little piece of society, still making an impact all the same.

The web knows you’ve clicked. Google knows you’ve searched. Your ISP knows you’ve downloaded, so don’t waste too much energy on worrying about leaving a trail of what you do when using a networked system like the web. A more interesting question to focus on is how much more can you know about yourself with the help of the web and what value could be derived from the data that you and other fellow citizens of the web are capable of feeding into it. As long as the publishing of data is done through a conscious decision and you pay attention to where the line of privacy is set, it’s hardly any more reckless behaviour than using the web in the old document oriented way. Same old channel, just a very different application.

Becoming digital

I bought my first mobile phone in 1997 (see the full timeline here). Prior to this I had absolutely no digital contact data assets whatsoever: just a rolodex, a few paper lists of addresses and the good ol’ memory. Sure, the world was a much smaller place back then, and as a high school  student living in the offline era there wasn’t that many people who you didn’t either meet at school or after school on a weekly basis. It was the villager way of life and I think we were all quite happy with it back then.

Mobile phones brought us the concept of electronic phone books, with SIM cards as the media used for transferring these from one device to another. Email client applications like Eudora and Outlook Express gave us the option to store email addresses as contacts in their own address books. Pretty soon the phones began to connect with your PC through a cable and handy software like Nokia PC Suite (don’t get me started on that one…). This meant you now had the problem of several mismatching address books on your computer, so the whole contact management concept started to become painful not just for corporations but private persons as well.

During the past few years we’ve seen some improvement on the situation, thanks to the wide availability of mobile data connections and push email services in the corporate world. If you keep your personal contacts and business contacts in the same address book, updating the records in MS Outlook and synchronizing data through MS Exchange (replace with your favorite non-Redmond software) has made phone number and email address management almost a non-issue.

What’s the problem?

Well, while we now have fairly decent solutions for address book sync and some established formats to make interoperability across platforms less painful, these are essentially solutions for the wrong problem. You see, not only have the address books become digital but so has life. Here’s my personal evidence of this:

• Everybody and their dog is on Facebook. With hundreds of millions of registered profiles, we’re far beyond the point where you’d need to make guesses about whether social networks will really catch on or not. They came, they saw, they conquered. Sure, you might be on VK or Renren instead of FB. That makes no difference, social networks are now as universal as SMS.
• I have “contacts” who don’t know me, nor do I know them IRL. The may be bloggers or twitterers who I follow regularly, which means they’re relevant people to me on a much higher frequency than old acquaintances in the address book who I may not interact with even once per year.
• A job is no longer for life. Knowing where someone worked 3 years ago, what his title was and how to reach him through land line or snail mail is of decreasing relevance to anyone. I’m more interested in knowing where you’re working today and with whom you’ve worked with, which is what LinkedIn was invented for (7 years ago already).
• The number of phone calls I make is dropping every year. I’ve reached the point where calls are the least preferred method of communication in my mobile “phone”. No matter how much the mobile revolution initially increased the amount of phone calls, it will only decline from here onwards. Meeting in person is effective for establishing shared understanding, exchanging textual information asynchronously is great for managing details, reacting to synchronous voice communication requests (a.k.a. phone calls) is, well… a distraction I like to minimize. The phone call is dead.
• Christmas is pretty much the only reason for me to use postal services nowadays. Be it cards or gifts, I’d prefer to replace them both with bits and services. Similarly, if you’re arranging a party, you’ll probably send an FB invite with the relevant information. Recording you home address is therefore not so relevant for me, whereas knowing your current/recent location through Foursquare might be much more interesting.

When I think about these facts, then glance at my Outlook address book, I see two worlds collide. Yes, may both be about people and communication, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

How can we manage?

What’s different in this brave new digital life when compared to the old offline world is that the number of channels and players is significantly higher and it will just keep on increasing. The possibilities become ever greater and so will our pains with the traditional address books. Tim O’Reilly has been writing about the missing Web 2.0 Address Book in 2007, others have speculated about the data management concepts it requires in 2010. If we’re lucky, at this rate the solution will arrive maybe a few years after HTML5 has become mainstream. In short, we’ve got to stop waiting for a new solution and find a way to live with the contacts we have for now.

For my task at hand, I chose Gist as the web application to take care of my immediate contact data management needs. Like any contact manager, it promises the same old “one place for all contacts” Holy Grail. What the service does is it asks you for your Facebook, Twitter and Gmail account authorization, then pulls in the contacts from each service and tries its best to merge them. LinkedIn contacts can be imported through a file, as can naturally Outlook data. In addition, there’s also a ranking algorithm that tries to identify the importance of each contact based on communication history, and by also allowing you to adjust the score, so the most frequent interactive connections float to the top.

Is it the new address book then? Who knows, I’m sure there’s also many other valid contenders besides Gist out there. The main point is that this approach of utilizing networks and integrating online channels blows the Outlook contact list right out of the water, no doubt about it. This is what’s relevant to me in 2010. Not the daunting task of recording phone numbers and street addresses completely separately from the interactions and channels. The information and the interactions are out there, just bring the data to me and let me enrich it as new connections get established and new channels emerge. Give me an app I can install on my Android phone and a plug-in I can use when viewing Gmail. Allow me to discover more about my contacts through suggestions of in which networks they are present in.

I started with the assumption that I wanted to update and keep my address books in order. It turns out this wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. What I really wanted was a way to keep in touch.

A healthy dose of reality

When going through some of the ancient entries originating from my SIM cards, I realized something which can be all too easy to forget while sitting in front of your PC: not everybody is online. I’d like to say “not yet”, but that would be perhaps too optimistic. Considering how young the trend of being present in the web with your real name and real thoughts still is, even in the short history of the mainstream internet, the current divide between who “are” in the web and who’re just consuming the content is quite understandable. Blogging requires effort, LinkedIn may not fit every kind of profession and Twitter is something most people can’t get their head around yet. The FB boom is covering up the fact that most people are not yet ready to adopt the digital lifestyle. Fair enough, I’ll keep you as an offline entry in my contact list, waiting for the day when you will be ready.

I felt like such a stalker, but was I really stalking on the poor guy? That is a question I was left pondering as we parted our ways and I moved on to the next list of tweets. Unlike in Facebook and some other networks that are repeatedly making headlines for alleged privacy violations, Twitter truly represents the raw power of untamed social networking applications. There is no privacy, period. The name of the game is in the public broadcasting of your thoughts to an unspecified audience. You don’t need to worry about the concept of a “friend”, as there are no friends in Twitter. You can of course follow other users, but this doesn’t have any impact on what they can see and know about you. It’s all out there and that’s why we love it. That’s what makes it the ultimate sharing platform.

Let’s take a look into the future for a minute. Layar is a great mobile app for demonstarting the concept of augmented reality. How it works is you launch the AR browser in your mobile phone, point the camera to any direction and Layar will start to append the image with location based information. The usual stuff like restaurants and points of interest are of course available, but you can also view things like geotagged tweets. With the kind of devices we are carrying around in our pockets, it is not at all far fetched to envision a time when you can pull up an augmented reality browser that shows you not just the buildings around you but the names of the people. Think of avatars and @username’s floating on top of the commuters in the traffic jams. The ultimate nude scanner for your mobile?

In the tech or media industry, or any knowledge work intensive line of business, it can no longer be considered bizarre behaviour to be constantly revealing yourself to the world through various social media sites and services. It is rather becoming the norm of what is expected. You better be active on Twitter and Foursquare, otherwise there’s a risk of people thinking you don’t “get it”. Ok, I’m perfectly fine with that trend, with my active sign-up policy to new and exciting web apps.

It is only when the virtual world meets the physical world that things can start to feel ackward. When you meet a familiar avatar in flesh and blood, there cab be a sudden sensation of “OMG, I know too much about you, yet you don’t know anything about me”. The unilateral nature of the relationship can play tricks with your head. People you’ve never met but who you’ve followed through Twitter can start to feel like pseudo celebrities, even though they are likely to be far more average Joe’s in reality than you are, with nothing better to do than posting stuff online 24/7.

I think we’re reaching the uncanny valley of social networks. This concept was originally introduced for describing how in the field of robotics there is a point in which the machines can begin to look too human, thus causing a natural feeling of revulsion in us human beings. In the world of social networks, this same sensation may be achieved by simply knowing too much about the stranger standing next to you. Something that is perfectly cool when sitting in front of your monitor at home can suddenly feel just plain “wrong” when meeting face-to-face. Sharing your life and thoughts is great, but just don’t do it when I’m around. God, us human beings can be such weird creatures at times.

Is there going to be a moment when we simply get enough of revealing ourselves to others? Will the new sociality trend reach its peak and make way for the ultimate privacy backlash, where people simply refuse to give out any personal details to any online service? I’d say that’s an unlikely scenario. Certainly we’ll need to go through the emotions and find the right balance, time and time again, but eventually we’ll have to make it across the valley. With social media and robots alike.

Facebook has such bad usability all-around that nowadays I tend to only navigate to Bejeweled Blitz and follow status updates throug TweetDeck. When do I then go to Facebook? When I get an email from the service, telling me that someone has commented my stuff or sent me a message. Rumor has it that Facebook is in fact working on developing a full webmail service, where you could receive messages to your vanityurl@facebook.com.

Google is the current king of email with Gmail. Nothing comes close, except the threat of people’s increasing usage of media other than traditional email for their messaging needs. Google isn’t standing still, instead they are trying to incorporate more and more social features into Gmail, like the recent announcement of Google Buzz. And where does the Buzz exist in terms of UI? In Gmail. Where do the comments to your status updates come to? Your inbox. ¡Viva la email revolución!

Google Wave is trying to go beyond email, but the current preview version (notice: not even beta!) has one severe limitation: it doesn’t act like webmail, meaning you can’t actually send emails to your @wave.com address. Yeah, what do you call and @address that’s not an email address? It’s hard to see the adoption rate picking up until Wave embraces email.

Numerous Enterprise 2.0 application providers are keeping themselves busy by building wonderful collaboration environments for office workers, to make them more productive in their daily tasks and teamwork. But still they can’t come anywhere near email. Everyone uses it and it is the lowest common denominator that every information worker loves to hate, but couldn’t live without. As Jacob Uckelson writes about the enterprise collaboration paradox:

So even though almost every enterprise has special purpose solutions available for collaboration and process management, good old e-mail always ends up being the primary method for both collaboration and processes in the enterprise. This can be called the “enterprise collaboration and process paradox,” and is the “dirty little secret” of both collaboration and process execution in the enterprise. Realistically, there doesn’t seem to be any way to displace e-mail as the king of collaboration and processes

Everybody used to be stressed about the growing amount of spam email a few years back. Today the rate of spam that avoids my junk email filters is probably 0,001%. Email used to be confined into desktop applications like Eudora or the omnipresent Outlook. Now it’s in the browser and in your mobile phone, meaning in practice everywhere.

Email has come a long way and it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s more likely that we’ll just be getting more of it.

Here’s a demonstration of the core difference. Slashdot.org is down (at the time of writing), so do I go to Facebook and yell this out to my friends? Hell no, I haven’t got enough nerdy buddies that would care about it. But what about on Twitter?

Nowadays the best way to determine whether a popular online service is down just for you or the entire web population is to do a search on Twitter. There is always going to be some people wondering the exact same question as you, to the extent that they will go through the effort of tweeting about it. That’s the real-time pulse that Google is still missing.

If only Twitter’s front page would be designed in a search oriented way, driving people towards entering search terms instead of new tweets (who needs more of them, anyway?), the perception of the service could be altered in a quite profound way. Until then, the average user will upon initial viewing just see it as Facebook without Farmville and Mafia Wars. For some people, that will of course be reason enough already.