Image via Wikipedia
The terminally-ill Google Wave was less a curious beast than one came at a curious time.
Mid-2009 was the time when Twitter was really, really coming into its own. Facebook had become a behemoth that was rapidly moving from "can it beat MySpace?" to "MyWhat?". The big social media innovations of the previous few years were going mainstream, because their barrier to entry - a short status update - were so much lower than those that had preceded them.
People who had missed blogging, had missed Twitter, had missed the rise of social networks, were suddenly desperate to catch the next wave that came along, and to catch it early. Google is a big, huge powerful company stuffed with PhDs. Wasn't it logical that they would be the ones to bring the next big thing forward? When the first announcement and demo of Wave was a show greeted with cheers and waving laptops from developers, the path to a clear, but wrong, assumption was laid.
Last summer was a bizarre time for me. I'd spent years telling people that various things were going to be important - from blogs to Twitter - and generally, being ignored by most people. Now everybody was enthusing about something new. We had internal discussions about it. We had meetings and brainstorming sessions, and I really started to wonder if I'd just got too old, that I was beyond the edge, that I had nothing to add to the future development of social media in the company, because people saw Wave as important, and I didn't.
To me, Wave looked awfully like a solution hunting around for a problem. It was a bunch of cool technologies that had been bundled together into a product that made no sense. I've tried an awful lot of Web 2.0 style products down the years, and you get a feel for those that stick and those that don't - and this felt like one that wouldn't. I just tried to find the blog posts I wrote about Wave - and discovered that there weren't any. That's a pretty good sign that I didn't care.
Continue reading The Wave That Drowned.
In the future, all news will be reported with unlikely CGI animation...
If there's one thing I'm surprised that's gone unnoticed in all the kerfuffle following Apple's keynote on Monday, it's the launch of Safari 5 and, more specifically, the addition of its new Reader feature. What does it do? Well, it detects when there's something that approximates to an article on the page you're on, and gives you a little Reader icon in the URL field, in the same place you normally see the RSS icon. Click that, and you get the view in the picture.
It's a stripped-down, easy to read version of the article, with all the page clutter gone. It's, frankly, lovely - a really good way to focus down on the content without being distracted by all the stuff we shove around the main point of the page.
A couple of people have suggested that publishers should be afraid of this - after all, it takes away all the advertising and links to other material. However, the Reader is only triggered once you hit the page, and you return to the original page as soon as you click outside the reader area. Indeed, providing intelligent places for readers to go next probably becomes even more important, as the Reader strips out the links within the content.
It does make me wonder if some of the design ideas from the iPad (or should I be calling it iOS now?) are finding their way back into the desktop products.
"It was very hot yesterday and the airconditioning at our datacentre in Croydon failed," said Bob Dunn, general manager of customer experience at O2. "It had to be cooled down, and there was a network outage in London."Slightly startling that the connections we have come to rely on are so dependent on airconditioning...
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
