The Next Step?

When I was 14 years old, I was not obsessed with computers, despite the hours I spent in front of them. Instead, I was obsessed with what computers did, and not how they worked. I did not understand TCP/IP, did not know what SATA meant, and I had no real concept of how it's many components worked together. In fact, most of that knowledge eluded me until I was in college and happened to stumble upon a fellow student who had a custom built tower with a water-cooled processor (which symbiotically heated his fish tank) which sent me into a nosedive of hardware geekery. My first love was for the function, however, not the form. I loved computer games, I loved digital photos and manipulating them, I loved Napster, and I even loved America Online. When I turned 11 years old my parents made the risky decision to get an AOL account and to let me have my own personal screenname. I was probably not the first of my peers to get this privilege, but it was a watershed event nonetheless. Each and every year that I get older, I look back on that decision that my parents made and gawk at the audacity. They could not possibly have known the size and scope of the door they were giving me a key to, and how could they have? Sure, they limited my access in terms of the amount of time I was logged in--"Get off AOL, I need to make a phone call!!"--but I can't believe that even my father, who was more excited about the internet than he would let on, had any concept of to what they had potentially exposed me.

One of the things that I latched on to after a few years trolling through AOL's sometimes sordid and often psychotic chat rooms, were the AOL Message Boards. I had recently become a die-hard Star Wars fan as Lucas had rolled out the special editions of each of his films, and this coincided nicely with my discovery of the AOL Message Boards and the Star Wars geeks that had found a home there. I was hooked on the concept of interacting with people from backgrounds incredibly dissimilar to mine, and as a young teenager, even more addicted to the equalization that the relative anonymity of the internet afforded. My opinions, my writing, and my knowledge held equal footing with those twice or three times my age. If I had a better idea, or if I knew something they did not, it was not discarded simply because I was 14--because no one knew I was 14 and no one cared.

Since then, the internet and our concept and use of it has evolved rapidly. I remember when people seriously referred to it as an Information Superhighway. At the time, that may not have been a terrible description, but I don't think anyone who called it that now could be taken seriously. I think even John McCain knows better. Still, it seems as though the watershed moments of evolution of the internet have lately been unintentional--filling needs we were largely unaware existed. Facebook was a project for college students that grew, virus-like, from campus to campus before spreading out to the public at large, well beyond it's original intent. Twitter, arguably the most recent evolutionary branch on the tree, was a lark of a project that existed for years with no one but the most Uber-geeks using it. I didn't even bother to get a twitter account until nearly 6 months after its launch, and then didn't use it for nearly another year. Twitter has grown out as a hybrid of the blogging (another somewhat unintentional mutation) and instant message branches of the tree, and is a fledgling of the Real Time Web which is just now being realized in a practical manner. 

The last arguably intentional evolution of the Internet came when we realized that we had no way of navigating it. AOL's search features were based on simple keyword matching, and as the web grew exponentially, were woefully inadequate. The first real and almost entirely successful attempt to organize the internet came from Yahoo!. Taking a very human approach, Yahoo! set out to organize the internet, one website at a time, as Yahoo! saw fit. Unfortunately for Yahoo!, this approach did not scale efficiently with the still exponentially growing internet. Along came Google with a more holistic and detached approach to the way the internet ought to be organized. Google used the size, speed, and very structure of the internet against itself in order to tame it. In a few short years Google became a verb and the rest is history.

Naturally, I've been waiting for Google Wave (the name a reference to communication in the Sci-Fi series Firefly and not in the least bit oceanic) since they announced it's existence more than a year ago. Google was setting out to change the fundamentals of the internet again, this time by overhauling the communication tools the internet relied on, the e-mail, the instant message, and the message board. Wave has been greeted with equal parts enthusiasm and skepticism by virtually everyone. On the one hand, Google has clearly had success in changing the way we use the internet before and Google search is an incredible tool. On the other hand, our e-mail is sacred. We just spent a decade making it do what we want and teaching our parents and grandparents how to use it! I finally received an invitation to Wave yesterday morning (thanks to Kyle Paice at HubSpot) and have had a limited amount of time to poke and prod it. At first blush, it's incredibly underwhelming, in much the same way my first contact with Instant Messenger was:

Ry Snake: Hey!

Skyhop7: Hey

Ry Snake: This is cool.

Skyhop7: yeah

Skyhop7: you going to school tomorrow?

Ry Snake: Yeah.

Skyhop7: gotchya. See ya then.

Skyhop7 has left the chat.

Wave is a tool like any other, and it's only as interesting as the way in which you use it and the people you use it with. On top of that, it's very clearly a "Preview". Google is notorious for their products staying in Beta long after they've been widely adopted by the public, so I think the fact that they are calling this a "Preview" and not a Beta is telling. Whole features are missing and there are still quite a few kinks that need to be worked out and options that need to be implemented before this technology can really be adopted by more than just the bleeding edge geek crowd. Aesthetically speaking, it is the best interface Google has mustered since it's original search homepage and yet it is still disappointing. I am not a fan of Google's design philosophy wherein everything ought to be both plastic looking and a primary color.  But the Wave interface is sleeker than most and less of an assault on one's eyes than, say, Gmail's. Despite the lack of features and occasionally crashes, there is an enormous amount of potential here. Just as Google Search, and search in general, has become the terminal or gateway through which we navigate all that the internet can offer, Wave has the potential to become the terminal through which we communicate electronically. Wave faces only two hurdles, though they are big ones. The first, and smaller of the two, is federation and acceptance. If Google Wave does not become adopted by users of all kinds and does not become a tool that others adapt to their own needs and spread their own flavors of, then it will be the tree that falls in the forest when no one is around. In this regard, Google has two things going for it: the huge market share it already enjoys with its other products, search, Gmail, and Reader, for example, and the fact that Wave is almost entirely open source, meaning that it will be tinkered with and improved upon by an entire globe's worth of coders, engineers, and IT professionals. The second, and larger hurdle, is the paradigm shift it asks of its users. Google Wave can only be described as very high bandwidth communication. Traditional internet communications, and most forms of communication in general, are either bidirectional or broadcast, and rarely both at the same time. Google Wave is simul-multicast. Everyone "in" a wave can not only see everything I've contributed, they can edit it or reply to it in real time, perhaps before I'm even done entering it. Fortunately, you can play these edits back and forth like you would a movie, and see each and every change as it happened, and who made it. In addition, anyone added to the Wave at any time can see everything currently there, and edit it all as well. While these features make Wave a potentially powerful tool for collaboration, it can also quickly become overwhelming. The only thing that Google has going for it in this regard is that with each passing day a new cadre of users from the next generation arrive at the shores of the internet (I really tried not to make any nautical references in here. Sorry.) and they are not so put off by high bandwidth communication, in fact, they thrive on it.

Google's Wave may not be the future. It may not change the way in which we process work, it may not kill e-mail, it may not even survive. But the scope and scale of their attempt is as exciting as it is enormous. If Google pulls off the massive task of polishing the interface and putting the proper security and controls in place, then change--maybe gradually, but inevitably--will come to the internet once again. Or, put another way, the last time I had an experience similar to Wave--like a technology had brought me to brink of something new and not entirely understood--was the first time I heard, "Welcome! You've got Mail!" 

 My utterly unscientific and unresearched flowchart of the Internet's evolution.