The Steve Rubel Stream

Hmmm, and Twitter solved which problem exactly? I think you are partly right, currently Wave won't solve any existing problems, but people will find uses for it and if one or two of those stick then yes, it will be huge.

@Gordon, Twitter did solve problems - the ability to easily post from mobile devices and see the same from others. However, it may not solve enough problems to stick. Speaking of which, read Made to Stick.

If it simple enough, people will find problems that new tech can solve. Which is what twitter did. However, if it is powerful enough, someone geeky might find a way to put a simpler layer in front of it. Perhaps that will be the fate of Wave. Or maybe it will just be DOA. It wouldn't be the first IT project to go that way.

You have to remember that Wave is very early. I think Wave will excel at integration of many web services eventually, but it needs to be opened up so that devs can develop robots/gadgets (a bit like the App Store really sold iPhones).

I'm wandering if Rss had a good marketing or if it had any marketing at all towards ordinary people.. as opposed to the huge Twitter/Facebook media coverage. What do you think?

Problem in need of a solution: Editorial Rooms. There. I said it.

I think RSS failed because of complexity. Remember early on, when you clicked on an RSS button and got code? There was no explanation telling people what to do with it. Too geeky.
Looks like Wave will fail due to complexity as well. Google has an issue with this in general.

May I ask a dumb question? This is the second time I read that RSS is either dying or dead. Am I the only one who loves it? What am I missing. I subscribe to 50 feeds and gets dozens of in-depth, interesting articles every day. I know twitter's strength, but it's certainly not in-depth. Someone help me here.

@brian - I don't get this one neither...

@Brian, I love RSS. I probably use Google Reader more than I do any other app short of email. That said, however, it never crossed the chasm - that's a fact.

Great insightful and honest post

I always enjoy reading your views as you provide answers!

Very interesting post. It is what I feared but you gave certainty on Google Wave

I'm in the same boat Steve, I think it's ahead of it's time.

"In many ways it's overly complex. In fact it's too complex for the era of the Attention Crash where all of us, especially knowledge workers, are crying for simplicity."

This reminds me of when I was a Y! intern and in a meeting with Caterina Fake of flickr, where she was taking about how when flickr came out, the whole tagging system was 3-4 years ahead of its time. The vast majority of flickr users did not know how to tag things or what tags were. I feel Wave is the same way right about now.

That and XMPP is not fun for developers, I don't think we will be seeing too many interesting Wave-based add-ons.

I think it's going to be extremely helpful for small businesses. There is a bit of a learning curve but I've only had GW for 24 hours and haven't learned everything it can do.

Here are some of our thoughts on its added value to the virtual office: http://www.freelancesocialmedia.com/google-wave-for-the-virtual-office/

"But as Mike Elgan, Anil Dash and Scoble wisely assess, .."
So 3 die-hard Microsoft worshiper/shills come down hard on it only hours after today's release. Sounds to me like Microsoft is really worried about Wave.

What a load of bullshit. Wave solves the problem of having numerous accounts on various social and other services. It features an open API, quite contrary to the locked-up corporate environments of Facebook and the like. Your post shows a thorough misunderstanding of the most basic facts about the service.
Disclaimer: I am not a Google employee.

Yup, read Made to Stick, but I'd still argue that Twitter only solved a technological problem, and how people use it now is an extension of capability, not problem solving. Subtle but different.

And I agree that RSS never quite made it. It won't ever die and it may yet have its time.

Haven't had a chance to try Google Wave yet, but really enjoyed hearing this perspective. Thanks for the insight!

Well, I don't agree at all with you comment that it does not solve any problems for the normal user. I got a test account and tried many functions already. It solves an very important problem that everyone has. It does solve the mess that comes with planning a trip, event etc. and sharing the pictures/videos afterwords. This is a frequent daily activity that can be spread many times in 50-100 emails. No more scrolling and searching through old threads of email!! (or at least a lot better sorted). This is truly a time saver. Everyone needs that.

Regarding this last comment from Marcus... I've seen people doing all kinds of cool things to solve the "mess" problem. Personally I'm using ShareIn and Posterous to share stories and photos/media/etc. And the one innovation that I really like is hardware - Eye.fi, which is the camera memory card that flushes the photos/vids off your camera and sends them to Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, wherever - via your local wi-fi net. URLtxtbar is another simple fix that I appreciate. Here are some of my extended thoughts on the simplification issue: http://bit.ly/VIjkA

I have not tried Wave.

To wave or not to wave

I was impressed by the demo, but at the same time I thought, where is this going. We just got used to social media and already it consumes more time and energy than ever before. Info stress is building and building. I don't see why Google Wave may enrich the lives of most people, as it may cost extra time and energy to follow (and playback) the amounts of waves.

So in stead of 'revolutionize' the web, I hope companies will focus more on what really makes our lives more enjoyable, looking at the balance between offline and online time. Technology and social networking should not be a goal itself.

I think its critical how this product - and the others it competes with, evolve over the next 6-18 months. I feel Twitter is reaching a point of diminishing returns already. These technologies turnover so fast, they need to constantly infuse new mechanisms to improve utility. That said, Wave may not be great now, but because of the Google name people will try it, so they have an audience to make it better.

I am just SOOOO sharing your views... why can't my geeky friends understand us ? I'll wait 4 them to try, then come back !

If it's too complex, then simplify it. What's with the everythingsuckism?

Steve, I would love to introduce a technology and have it be only as successful as RSS. A 2005 (!) estimate of the number of people that use RSS (directly or indirectly) in the US and UK was a staggering 275 million!

See: http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2005/10/08/478598.aspx

Now I agree that RSS has not become an absolute *magic bullet* that solves every problem there is (nothing has), but it is actually in use, right now, solving millions of real world problems.

I think you are right that Wave is of similar importance. I think you are wrong in your assessment of the level of importance. Remember, Wave is in an embryonic stage. But the architecture and processing model have me thinking that you ain't seen nothin' yet in terms of how Wave will be applied.

hey certainly Google wave is quite an opportunity for Google to take what is left on the internet....
hey get more reviews here....
http://jitsin.spaces.live.com

Google has a tendency to be so engineering driven (no offense meant to lots of brilliant engineers) while forgetting the "average user" on the web's lack of attention span. Wave could be successfull if they listen to feedback and make it much more palatable for the average person who lives on email, Twite and/or other Social Media. In in the end, Google has to motivate people to move to Wave and deal with standard "switching costs" in the market.

Thanks for the interesting posting. Here i have been noticed for the Wave. Thanks and to Google for their a lot of innovations. RSS it is easy to be in touch :-)

No offense, but RSS did catch on and literally drives most of the tools that you discuss here, right?

As for what problem this solves, it makes office group work or collaborations a real-time and very organized process. That's just one. It eliminates having multiple platforms to communicate with others. That's just a couple of the top of my head.

I also use RSS every day, I think it's a mainstream success now. I would like to try the wave, see what that's all about.

Twitter, et al., no interest from me.

RM

Steve, your question "what problem does it solve" really gets to the heart of the problem with Wave. Every customer experience starts with a person who has a problem or desire they'd pay money to solve.

It's fine that as customers can't articulate the need (if Henry Ford asked his customers what they wanted they would have said 'faster horses') - but we have to ACT on something. Products aimed at no clear triggering need are doomed. Google may be "learning live" with Wave. That would be expensive learning. I'm anxious to see what happens next.

More on how solving a customer need is directly connected to financial performance: http://www.ceforprofit.com/domino.html. Thanks for your post, Steve.

Linda Ireland

What problem does this solve? Anyone who has worked on collaborative projects will see the answer very quickly. My first thought was that once I have my team on Wave, I can kiss SharePoint goodbye.

Hi Steve, dunno whether you are still reading comments on this article? Regardless, your question about the value that Wave provides has had me thinking ever since I read it (and subsequently started using Wave about 2 weeks ago.)

I just came across an article that sums up my take perfectly, and might be a useful answer to your original question:

http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html

Arthur

I also use RSS every day

Very interesting article. Has really hit the nail on the head for me although I agree with a lot of the comments here that it's far too early to really appreciate what Google Wave will become. I'm liking the statement: '..what does Google Wave solve?..' afterall, you could say email is still perfectly adequate for the 21st century although that's not to say there's no reason to rewrite email. Man, if I had a dollar for every time I've rewritten some code to make it better OO or more secure I'd have a Bugatti Veyron by now :-)

Moving on, strangely enough, I'm seeing a natural resistance (i.e. old habits die hard) towards Google Wave amongst even my tech friends to revert back to MS Messenger and Google Talk to collaborate on-line, despite my pushing towards Wave. Due to that experience alone, I can see it's going to take a while before the average Internet user starts to embrace Wave, and that's even when we all have a better idea of what Google can be, after all, I believe the public opinion favours something with purpose rather than an unknown entity which it currently feels like, at least, within the media.

P.s. Just a Blip about the more recent comments regarding RSS. Personally, I think there's some truth to be told in how social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube have changed public opinion of the Internet. Back when RSS was released, on-line services were very much seen as 'geeky' tools whereas now people are far more interested with on-line tech almost to the point where they're looking for new on-line toys to play with, even for the none techies.. With this said, I think if RSS was released today it would probably do far better.

Thanks,

learn truth now

Yeah, you're completely missing the point. It solves HUGE current problems. You just don't realize they ARE problems because you're so used to them and have - until now - had no alternative but to accept them as unavoidable parts of the internet.

"Hosted Conversations" is the magic word. Centralizing the way we talk and share stuff on the internet is so mindblowingly different from the way we've always done stuff up till now that it's easy to see a post like this having trouble even realizing how many things we'd LIKE to do but never could before have been solved by Wave.

Take posting pictures, for example. You take a shiny new album, you post it on Facebook. But oh wait, you have some myspace friends you'd like to share the pics with too. And there's a forum you're a member of where you'd like to share the pics as well...

Pre-Wave, you can either give up and go home, or you can post separate copys of the same pictures to all those different sites!
-If you want to do face tagging (pretty much the best part of posting pics on the internet), you've gotta tag the same face in the same picture 2 or 10 dif times.

-If anyone leaves a comment, it's attached only to that copy of the pic, on that one site. The same pic on all the other sites is left nekkid and commentless.

-(The copies in all those different places is also wasting space, on the off chance you care about cluttering up the internet/storage)

Great points made throughout

RSS hit it HUGE with me ... I'm also the targeted 'tech/information-guru' demographic. The general population will catch on to RSS indirectly. Meaning, tech people like us creating web apps that make advanced features of RSS into easy to use features. Those sites are just starting to pop up so it may take 2 or 3 more years for it to hit the average-tech mainstream demographics and move at a steady pace into the more general mainstream population.

I find it very interesting that you're putting Google Wave and RSS in the same line (I've actually gotten to your website by searching for "Google Wave RSS"). I think Wave as the potential to replace RSS if it gets embedded in most websites as a content container. See, instead of subscribing to RSS feeds and getting updates when my feed reader updates my feeds, I would subscribe to the Wave containing the blog post for example, and I would see the wave in my inbox every time someone begins to type a comment, or the post is updated, in real time.

The same people who are huge RSS uses might be to use Wave for this kind of activity when websites begin to use it as a backbone for their data.

What a load of bullshit. Wave solves the problem of having numerous accounts on various social and other services. It features an open API, quite contrary to the locked-up corporate environments of Facebook and the like. Your post shows a thorough misunderstanding of the most basic facts about the service.
Disclaimer: I am not a Google employee.