Ray Ozzie – emerging technology Google Wave “is anti-Web”. Is Wave just too complicated to become popular?
On reading the term “anti-web”, my gut feel is “perhaps the web has had its day”. Perhaps it is time for our understanding of “web” to move forward. Am I drinking the web 2.0 kool-aid? Perhaps a little. As I spend more time thinking about social media and what can be achieved as people collaborate via technology, the underlying technology appears less and less significant.
From the days of dial-up bulletin boards, through to web-based forums, facebook, blogs, twitter, and wikipedia, the specific technologies have been – to some extent – unimportant.
Provide people with the means – whatever means – to collaborate online, make it stable enough to support a critical mass of users, and you create a virtual space where community can take place. One where the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. It is this sense of community that has people come back to sites, that motivates them to generate content and share it.
Whether Ozzie is right or not on this particular point, Google Wave represents a step forward in conceptualising online collaboration, and will end up shaping the way that people collaborate.