I don’t think that Simler will be a Facebook or Twitter killer, but there are several features that interest me enough to not stop thinking about it. (That’s gotta be a good sign right? Knowing how that went for Twitter?)
- Instead of reading and discussing topics with your friends because they are your friends, Simler lets you find the topics (tags) that interest you, so you can consume and create content under them. You could say it’s a reformatted message board or chatroom, so is it really a new thing?
- The tagging concept keeps me on the fence as well. I like the idea of trying to define yourself with these keywords, but the novelty wears off when you realize it’s not much different from the way we list interests in virtual profiles and slambooks. And what does it mean when I add the IE6 tag to my profile? It definitely does not mean I like using it! What about the “Awkward Silence” tag? Eventually it will become a race to see who comes up with the wittiest name.
- I’m not sure it will actually scale. Will there be a way to organize the tags a user collects as time passes? Surely some people’s egos will find anything less than a thousand tags to be insufficient to describe their interesting selves. Then again, the Twitter era answer to that is: when there’s an API, there’s a way.
Simler poses interesting questions regarding how we pursue our interests on the Web. Do you join groups because your friends are in it? the cool kids are in it? or because you’re interested in the discussions? Are you tired of the insipid updates filling up their live streams? Should you take a more active role in choosing the content you see? Is the level of control for doing so enough?
One of the most ambitious efforts to come out of the Googleplex (or anywhere, really) in ages is Google Wave, a real-time messaging, sharing, and collaborating service unveiled last week. Finally, Google’s crack at the Real-Time Web. We’ve been waiting.
Google’s Real-Time Web
You might recall ReadWriteWeb proclaiming the big G missed the boat on that, as Twitter rules over real-time search these days. However, Wave makes one realize there is more to the real-time web than 140-character messages.
It’s a new way of doing things. It’s decentralized, open-source, and poised to take over online communications the way email has, since it’s built as a fundamental protocol. But it’s not even just “the new email”, it lets you do a lot more than that. It was built to service needs knowing the capabilities of the Web today:
Ezra Pound once wrote: “”The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” And elsewhere: “Make it new!”
Even more than the application itself, I love the way Wave doesn’t just build on what went before but starts over. In demonstrating the power of the shared, real-time information space, Jens and Lars show a keen understanding of how the cloud changes applications.
When I saw Wave for the first time on Monday, I realized that we’re at a kind of DOS/Windows divide in the era of cloud applications. Suddenly, familiar applications look as old-fashioned as DOS applications looked as the GUI era took flight. Now that the web is the platform, it’s time to take another look at every application we use today, and ask the same question Lars and Jens asked themselves: “What would this look like if we invented it today instead of twenty-five years ago?”
This is not another reboot of the social network format the way Google redid email with Gmail and redid search with Google Search. But it does feel this is the way social interactions on the Web were supposed to be. Aren’t you tired of signing up over and over for the hottest new web service, OpenID/etc. not withstanding?
I love the diversity and downright chaos of the Internet, but the future has got to be seamless integration between all things. Text, photos, videos, blog posts, polls, calendars, petitions, lyrics, jokes, LOLcats, whatever.
Now when Google says real-time, it means your friend’s message appears on your screen by the character, instead of a “your friend is typing…” notice as you twiddle your thumbs. It also means you can reply to any part of your friend’s message, edit any part of a document, and replay exactly how everything happened when you’re done. See video above. It’s brilliant.
Terrifying ramifications?
That’s barely scratching the surface. I’m not sure if the protocol will succeed—not everybody lives in real-time online, or can handle this many features (see Twitter).
If it does succeed, it might become too successful that users are addicted, possibly trapped in this real-time space. We continue to blur the line between the real and the virtual, and even if at this point we can tell the difference between the two, will we ever reach the point of being “too” connected, transparent, hyperreal?
I’m not even sure if we should be trust yet another invention from Google—there has to be something in it for them, right?
Are you terrified yet? I think I am, but I’m pretty excited too.
Matt Mullenweg, of WordPress fame, is mad, and this time I’m not bitching about not giving designer credits in the upcoming (?) WordPress.com theme marketplace. No, this is even zanier.
You see, Matt recently published a post titled Top Emailers on his blog, listing the ten people that sent him most e-mails in 2007. Toni Schreider popped him 996 of ‘em by the way, he tops it.
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