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…

We all knew it was coming, but someone had to say it

Last July I wrote a blog post on how the world will end for Nokia. At that time I was deeply frustrated with the mainstream media reporting on how the brand new Nokia N8 and the updated operating system Symbian^3 were going to start Nokia’s big fight to reclaim the position they had lost to Apple and all the Android manufacturers. Such claims were totally detached from the reality of what was happening in the mobile marketplace of 2010 and I’m sure not even most the Nokia personnel believed in them anymore.

A growing crowd of people were joining the cult of Apple, some of them skipping right to the end conclusion that iPhone was simply better and Nokia was therefore screwed – period. A much more telling sign was, however, that the ecosystem around Symbian application development was not only facing problems in growing its presence in the US markets – it was in fact dying altogether. Long time advocates of Symbian were throwing in the towel, because they couldn’t live with the huge gap between Nokia hype and lack of results delivered. Symbian and Nokia had become an embarrassment that no one wanted to associate themselves with anymore (in other words, an epic fail).

What I believed Nokia had to do was to admit their failure instead of trying to cover it up while attempting to build a replacement in the form of MeeGo. My concluding comment at that time was:

We don’t need an N8 from Nokia, or Symbian^4, or statements from Anssi Vanjoki about the company’s passion to reclaim smartphone leadership – we need a hard reset, and we need it yesterday.

That was what we have now finally received, first in the form of the burning platform memo from Stephen Elop and a few days later in the announcement of adopting Windows Phone as the primary smartphone platform for Nokia future devices. All of this had of course started already in September with the naming of a new Nokia CEO, when the Finnish Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (a long term member of Nokia’s former management “dream team”) was replaced not by another Finn like Vanjoki but with a man from Microsoft. Makes perfect sense, since it’s a lot easier to admit failure when you haven’t been the one causing it.

If you look at where Windows Phone 7 is coming from, you’ll see that also Microsoft went through a similar phase earlier on. They realized that the existing Windows Mobile platform foundation was simply not good enough to build on anymore, so Microsoft made a brave move to re-design WP7 from scratch, which meant they gave up on backward compatibility and a big catalogue of existing Windows Mobile apps while at it. Thanks to this earlier reset they were now able to get the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to commit to their platform. Think about that for a while: everyone fails sooner or later, but the winners will be those who are the quickest in admitting failure.

Symbian no longer exists (but would you like to buy one anyway?)

When I switched jobs in December (not related to mobile industry at all, BTW), I was presented with the dreaded question “which Nokia E-series phone would you like to have?“. Having lived without a Nokia phone for years, the thought of returning back to the non-touch S60 world was simply unbearable and literally made me feel sick in the stomach. There was absolutely nothing in the Nokia business phone catalogue that I wanted to carry in my pocket. To buy off some time, I asked if I could wait for the Nokia E7 release that was just around the corner. My employer agreed and I just continued using my personal Samsung device, powered by Android.

As it ever so often happens with Nokia product launches, E7 got delayed into Q1/2011. I ended up upgrading my personal Android device to HTC Desire HD (words cannot describe how much this thing rocks, but that’s another story). On Monday, February 7th, Nokia E7 finally started shipping in limited quantities to the Finnish resellers. The company representatives were calling it “the most important model this year” in terms of sales expectations. On friday, February 11th, the device was as good as dead. Why? Because Nokia pulled the plug on Symbian, as illustrated on the following slide.

Regardless of this fact, Nokia is still expecting to sell 150 million Symbian devices before the game is over. Hmmm… okay… and how exactly do you plan to trick people into buying them? If you’re shopping for cars, it’s perfectly justified to buy a 2011 model that you know is going to be soon superseded with a 2012 model. Typically you get a sweet deal with accessories, plus there’s unlikely to be too many “bugs” and product recalls for a proven model.

It’s not going to work quite like that in the mobile industry. Nokia E7 is surely a beautiful piece of hardware design and component engineering, built with the decades of expertise accumulated into Nokia’s organization for producing the best mobile phones out there, delivered through the most efficient logistics chain in the business. Unfortunately it is now merely an empty shell with a “burning platform” inside it. I wish there was a quick way to flash the operating system of E7 from Symbian^3 to Windows Phone 7. But as always, if it was easy, the Chinese would have already done it.

E7 may still be a viable option for the oldskool business crowd who just want a replacement for their existing Nokia Communicator, primarily for phone calls, calendar and email. But if that’s all you wanted, then why did any of the Symbian engineers bother coming to work in the morning for the past 5 years? I hate to be the one breaking this to you, but getting a touch screen device with built-in support for Facebook widgets will not be enough to show you what’s really going on in the ecosystem of today’s mobile applications. You still won’t understand what all the cool kids are doing with their mobiles. You won’t see the business opportunities until your iPhone using competitor shows them to you.

The end is the beginning

If you can’t be one of the cool kids at the school yard, then try and be one of the smart kids instead. You probably won’t gain overnight popularity, but you may end up making a nice living eventually and getting your revenge. While the iPhone is certainly no one hit wonder á la Razr, there is no proof yet that Apple (or Google) would have secured their position as the U2 of mobile phones, forever entitled to sold-out stadium gigs and undivided attention from the media.

Android is aimed almost exclusively at disrupting the dominance of iOS, which means Apple and Google are fighting for the same market position. Sure, their approach is different in many ways (closed system vs. open source, for example) and Android is reaching towards the lower end of the market where iPhones are not even intended to be an option (remember, that’s where Symbian was supposed to go and retire). Windows Phone 7 is in such early phases of its existence that the platform doesn’t yet have a clear identity of its own and it is therefore being typically described through comparison to iOS and Android. This approach is ignoring the key focus areas where WP7 does differ from the established players: business users and .NET developers.

Ask a corporate IT department about which platform they want to be supporting and it’s a case of choosing a lesser evil from iOS or Android. Both of them are prime examples of the consumerization of IT. People like me will no longer tolerate standardized hardware from our employers, we’ll just rather bring our own devices to work. The problem with the cool gadgets that are capturing the attention of geeks and consumers alike is that they have been designed specifically to YOU. You as a single person, who makes the single decision to buy. The needs of a group of people encapsulated inside an organization such as a corporate office are quite different. Security, administration, compatibility and all those boring aspects are actually quite crucial to delivering monetary results beyond personal satisfaction. The mobile platforms of the future will have to be a working compromise between usability and manageability. This is where Microsoft is ahead of Apple or Google, who don’t truly know how to operate in the business segment. Nokia also has some very relevant experience from trying to meet the needs of business users and should therefore be well positioned in formulating a winning strategy to get both the IT managers and the Outlook junkies to ask for  WP7 devices.

Some say Microsoft is a dying consumer brand. There’s a hint of truth in that, since the world of personal computing has been moving away from the traditional PC desktops, into cloud apps provided by the likes of Google, and more personal mobile devices like the iPhones and iPads. Microsoft is clearly a runner-up in both categories. At the same time, they do have an impressive record of charging against Nintendo and Sony with their Xbox 360, which shows they are not planning to become a purely business brand anytime soon. It would also be a mistake to assume that Microsoft is forever stuck on the desktop, as they are building a huge “platform in the cloud” offering as Windows Azure and all the related Online Services brands. Sure, Gmail beat Hotmail with ease, but it doesn’t look like Google Apps would be walking over Microsoft’s cloud-enabled Exchange/SharePoint offering quite yet. Microsoft’s “all in” cloud strategy is going to provide a highly credible portfolio of productivity apps to Nokia’s WP7 devices, certainly much more than they could have ever built on their own or acquired through weak partners like Yahoo.

Like Mr. Scoble put it in his blog post on the Nokia WP7 alliance, “apps are the ONLY thing that matters now”. If that statement holds true, then the producers of those apps are the ones whose interest you need to capture on day one. Yes, you know this one, so sing along with me: “Developers! Developers! Developers!” If Symbian was the most hostile development environment for mobile phones ever invented, then judging by the initial launch strategy of Windows Phone 7, it’s the complete opposite. Not only is Microsoft altogether making massive investments into its developer toolkits, the promise of easy application portability across mobile, desktop, console and browser environments must sound more tempting than learning to develop apps for yet another mobile platform that promises to be something big, one day, maybe. The world is full of .NET developers who Microsoft and Nokia can target to persuade them to extend their applications onto the closest possible mobile platform, which just happens to be WP7.

We all know the facts: Microsoft is not cool, Nokia is not cool. When put together, they will indeed look like a pair of turkeys initially. They will take a fair amount of beating after class from the tech blogger bullies and gangs of Android geeks from all over the globe. Nevertheless, once we get over this initial reaction and start seeing physical results from the partnership, there’s a very real chance that both Microsoft and Nokia will be stronger together than what they could have been on their own, without admitting their past failures.

There is a dark shadow looming behind the partnership, as Microsoft’s previous mobile partners have not really fared all too well after teaming up with Redmond. It may well turn out to be a similar bust for Nokia, only time will tell. Even though it’s clear that Nokia has a lot more at stake in the deal than Microsoft, it’s getting more and more embarrassing for Microsoft not to have a credible presence in mobile devices. While Microsoft has never been too great at new product innovation, they’ve proven time and again their ability to muscle into a maturing market. Let’s see if they mean business this time around.

Then came Twitter and all the TweetDeck style clients, which claimed the “real-time” and “dashboard” titles respectively. Suddenly the old RSS reader applications started to feel like a graveyard of old and irrelevant news, when all the big stories and best articles seemed to flow from your tweeps via URL shorteners within hours or minutes from publishing. All this meant that browsing through your RSS feeds became more of a chore that you had to do every now and then, a bit like keeping your inbox clean. At the same time I had also abandoned Netvibes due to its continuous technical glitches and moved over to the simple choice, i.e. Google Reader. We all know Google is great at productivity apps for information management utility services, so this further played down the status of RSS feeds for me.

I started to feel increasingly unbalanced in this situation where my online media diet had transformed from an á la carte meal to a series of fast food pick ups. Sure, I was getting absolutely great links through Twitter, but my ability to focus on following any single topic was rapidly eroding as the gap between RSS feeds and real-time feeds was growing. One night when sitting on a train without any headphones or books with me, I spent a couple of hours on gReader for Android and went through the unread items in by Google Reader queue. When I reached my destination, I had started to better understand what the world of information around me looked like and how I should change my reading habits.

First, the concept of “unread items” is a relic from working with email clients, therefore we should get rid of in the world of feeds and tweets. Trying to use this metaphor there is like saying “you have 6,000,000 unread sites in the internet”. Only messages from a person to a person should carry the assumption that you have the duty to read through the item. This is why spam in your inbox makes you so angry, whereas a banner on a site can just be gracefully ignored, even if they both would spend exactly the same amount of time in your line of sight.

Second, you shouldn’t read all RSS’s with a single application. Yes, technically you could have just one great tool for managing all the bits that are distributed through the RSS format, but you don’t do both work and personal email through the same inbox either, do you? (At least I hope you don’t?) There are two main types of content that I have on my list of RSS subscriptions: posts and news. What I call posts is the traditional blogging kind of content that is written and published by people who don’t write this content for a living (they may get paid for it, but it’s not their main task). Then we have the news content, which is the traditional newspaper style articles that get published by either old or new media houses, be it WSJ or TechCrunch. Treating these two separately is what I believe to be the key to resolving my RSS anxiety.

Any feed that regularly publishes more than 2 items per day should be categorized as news. No matter how remarkable the content might be, it should be consumed differently. Just like you don’t read through each and every article in the morning newspaper (if you still subscribe to a physical paper, that is), the news feeds are meant to be glanced at from a high level and then read selectively. Whereas if you follow a blog that consistently delivers good analysis or entertaining stories, reading through each and every post at least with some level of attention may well be justified. Getting caught in reading “the whole newspaper” is all too easy if the delivery channel and presentation of the content is identical to posts. Instead of searching for a tool that can separate and categorize the content just the way you want it, do the easy thing: split the feeds into two totally separate RSS readers.

After an autumn clean-up, my toolbox for the digital media diet is now as follows:

• TweetDeck for Twitter feed/lists/hashtags, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare updates
• Google Reader for blog post RSS feeds
• Netvibes for news RSS feeds

I went through my old Netvibes dashboards one by one, moving subscriptions to either Google Reader, a brand new dashboard in Netvibes or just deleting them (wish I had even more courage with the last category). Similarly, anything that was filling up my Google Reader in a newsfeed style got moved to Netvibes. When it came to reviewing some of the older blogs that had become less active, I also checked to see if the writer was nowadays in Twitter and if they were posting any content of interest over there. The same kind of quantity metrics apply to tweets as well, but that’s a whole different post I need to write later.

So far I must say I feel considerably more at ease with the feeds and other information sources around me. Let’s see if the system works on a longer term, or until new channels come along. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, I guess it’s all about not searching for the one ultimate hammer but rather selecting the right tool for each job.

Google Wave was an island

There was no easy nor logical way to incorporate Wave into your ordinary workflow. If you weren’t opening wave.google.com on your browser, you were not “on the wave”. The most critical thing was that even though it looked almost exactly like a webmail client, and your user account had the form of username@googlewave.com, there was no email integration whatsoever. It’s bad enough that you couldn’t subscribe to any Wave updates to your inbox (later this feature was added without much fanfare), but the fact that a company hosting one of the largest email services in the world goes and assigns users pseudo email addresses you can’t send messages to is something that still boggles my mind. Ok, I understand that Google Wave was supposed to be something beyond email, but even emails could be printed on paper. How about some backward compatibility, eh?

Google Wave did not solve a specific problem

Most people just couldn’t quite figure out what exactly they were supposed to use Wave for. Pretty much everybody saw the potential of it for something useful, but were they able to picture themselves as a user in a specific use case where Wave was a natural fit? Let’s face it: there’s no point in releasing a technology demo and expect people to start using it straight away. What in fact was missing was the real product. Wave gave us the tools, but it would have probably taken an ecosystem around it to turn these tools into products that people could utilise for solving a specific problem (which Google did try to encourage through it’s API and federation protocol offering). Yes, collaboration challenges tend to be universal, but that doesn’t mean you could simply throw technology at them and expect people to take it from there.

Google Wave was not social

Given that the beta program with its invitation only approach initially stirred up quite a lot of interest towards the service, with invitations sold on eBay for $70, the approach quickly turned on its head. Let’s say that there were several groups of people in your company that were experimenting with Wave. How could you identify these particular people that were potential co-wavers and collaborators? Not through the service you wouldn’t. It happened on the corridors and water coolers, or in long email threads (sigh) circulating around the office. Come to think of it, for a company revolving around the concept of search, Google’s products can be incredibly hard to find. Just compare the findability of users and information on Twitter vs. Google Buzz.

Google Wave was developed by… Google

Huh? Why is that a bad thing? Well, let me explain. Google knows us all, but we still have no effective way of knowing each other through Google. This lack of the social dimension is perhaps the most significant barrier currently limiting Google’s growth beyond “just” indexing all the world’s data. 10 years ago that must have seemed like the ultimate goal you could have within the scope of Internet. Ever since the ‘net has evolved from a collection of documents to a platform for human interaction, that goal no longer sounds like the Holy Grail. Wave, just like Buzz or Orkut, relies on tapping into the social behaviour between people, not just a lone swordsman searching for a piece of information in the sea of data. Designing services to this new breed of customers requires a new way of thinking, which Google is only in the process of learning. Read this excellent post for further analysis on why Google cannot build social applications.

Just because the “surf’s up” for Wave, doesn’t mean the game’s over for Google’s initiative to change how people collaborate on information online. On the contrary: because they keep on trying, they can eventually succeed. Obviously there’s no other path for the corporation that’s built its product success on the concept of perpetual beta. I’ll hold up my board and wait for the next big wave.

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.