Social Media: Will Google’s Wave Drown Twitter?
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 1, 2009 | Share This
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There I was last week, on vacation in an undisclosed location deep in the Canadian Rockies when all the hubbub over Google’s Wave broke out. For those of you who missed it, Google announced that they will be launching a product called Google Wave later this year that combines some of the functionality of e-mail and IM to create a new open source communications platform.
Open source communications? E-mail? The juxtaposition of the two phrases in news reports stirred some deep memory in my gray matter. Then it hit me.
Way back in late February head Googler Eric Schmidt seemed to dismiss Twitter by calling it a “poor man’s e-mail.” Oh, burn! Check out how Scmidt clarified his statement on CNBC, by way of Henry Blodget:
“WE ADMIRE TWITTER. WE THINK TWITTER DID A VERY GOOD JOB OF EXPOSING A WHOLE NEW WAY TO COMMUNICATE. IN CONTEXT IF YOU READ WHAT I SAID, I WAS TALKING ABOUT THE FACT THAT COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS ARE NOT GOING TO BE SEPARATE. THEY’RE ALL GOING TO BECOME INTERMIXED IN VARIOUS WAYS. PEOPLE WILL USE EMAIL, THEY WILL WANT TO USE TWITTER FACEBOOK, THEY WILL WANT TO USE THE OTHER FORMS.”
So is Google Wave actually a Twitter killer in e-mail killer’s clothing?
It’s hard to come up with a definite answer without actually using it but from what we’ve seen the potential is there. However there is a huge difference in how each one is used. Twitter is essentially a “pull-push” model, where you broadcast information to followers who opt in to every one of your communications.
Google Wave is a narrowcast in which you could conceivably send all your communications to all of your contacts, but are more likely to put together different groupings for different purposes. As Google describes it, Wave is great for discrete project based communication.
Though this is a pretty fundamental difference, it wouldn’t take much to use the same principles and cool functional advances that Wave is promising (drag and drop file sharing, editable and searchable conversation threads) and tilt the functionality towards a Twitter like-model. It already seems likely that Google’s Twitter-like open API for Wave will lead to Twitter/Wave cross-posting at the very least.
Twitter still has the advantage so far of its simplicity, which has allowed it to be easy to grasp and use fairly quickly. It’s also allowed the platform to scale up via third-party apps to meet all kinds of functional needs. While Wave encompasses some exciting ideas on first blush it doesn’t seem as straightforward.
In the end Wave may never evolve into a Twitter-like platform, but don’t discount the threat of such a development as a bargaining chip if Google ever decides that they really want to press Twitter into a sale.
Topics: Google, Social Media, Twitter |
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