Every few years someone re-invents real time chat. Back in the 70s we had teletypes in the high school computer lab. Internet purists had IRC to keep themselves entertained in the 1980s, while the early 90 gave us AOL chat rooms for the rest of us poseurs. Soon, we all had ICQ numbers (I still have mine memorized), then AIM aliases, which were soon replaced by jabber handles, Google chat IDs, and then came the facebooks. All shared some basics: real-time typing, conversation windows, text-centric, and just below the speed of verbal communication. Still, they’re all just variants on the real-time chat, a communication path that’s been around since The Beginning.
If we were to graph a spectrum of communication forms, spreading them out along the x-axis in terms of speed, and y-axis for quality of information, then email would be somewhere to the left and slightly higher than chat: It’s not real-time (you send something, and an answer comes back whenever the other person feels like it), but it can contain pictures and video, so it’s arguably better quality. Below and to the left, we would have twitter: asynchronus, poor quality (short). To the right of chat we would telephones (real-time verbal), and above that we would Skype: real-time verbal communication with the bonus of your friend’s beautiful face on your screen. Skype’s real-time video conferencing should be superior (above and to the right) of all of them, right?
Why do we still have the other forms around?
- Is it because we don’t necessarily always want to see the other person? [yes]
- Is it because we sometimes don’t want to deal with the other person (your boss or girlfriend or bosses’ girlfriend or boss-you-wish-was-your-girlfriend) in real-time? [yes]
- Is it because we want to spew something out of low-quality and not have to burden ourselves with the responsibility that comes with actually having to put forward a cogent logical position? [yes]
So, it seems there is room for something that can land in that flexible in-between the safe distance that asynchronous email gives us, but the conversational flow of chat. If it were an open platform, people could start grafting on the higher-quality content elements like music and videos and pictures of cats eating cheezburgers.
Enter GoogleWave. I’ve had it for a little while now, and I see some promise if people understand the construct. Google is betting that people will want to sometimes be real-time, sometimes not-so-real-time, sometimes lo-fi, sometimes hi-fi. I bet they’re right.
My GoogleWave ID is tokyodave@googlewave.com. Hit me up.
The Wave of hybrid communication may have arrived and GoogleWave might be our generation’s Prius. I recall (dating myself now) a day when CB radios were ubiquitous. We often ‘chatted’ with CB’ers for the sake of using this newly discovered and affordable technology without having much purpose for our conversations. We do that now with IM formats, telling people what direction we are headed on the highway or letting your friends what the score is at the ball game. I get bored fast these days (as I did back then too). My old CB quickly found its way into the garage, and when it failed to sell at the garage sale, it was thrown into the trash heap. New forms of communication and entertainment emerged (Computer Games, Email, Cell Phones). My old phones and video games all get recycled now instead of thrown into the trash. They say that number of quality friends/contacts one has remained unchanged (about 3) over the last few generations, regardless of advances in technology/software. That’s hard to believe, but this statistic is exactly correct in my life. I hope that whatever the medium of choice for communication, that it stays that way, not fewer, not more.
Andy