• Offers the possibility to improve upon a broad range of communication, collaboration, and/or text-based product categories, such as:
  • Search
  • Word processing
  • E-mail
  • Instant messaging
  • Microblogging
  • Blogging
  • Mini-portals (Facebook-style)
  • Mini-portals (Sharepoint-style)
• In particular, allows these applications to be both much more integrated and interactive than they now are.
• Will have open developer APIs.
• WIll be open-sourced.

If this all works out, Google Wave could play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more.

I suspect it will.

And by the way, there’s a cool “natural language” angle as well.

For starters, here are some basic links:

• Google has naturally set up a home page for the Google Wave project.
• Featured on that page but also separately available is an 80-minute video introducing Google Wave.
• Techcrunch has two highly detailed posts on Google Wave, one summarizing what’s in the main Google Wave video and one reporting on a Google Wave Q&A.

Here are some reasons I think Google Wave could actually live up to its promise:

• The email problem Google Wave purports to solve is real and critical. The email paradigm assumes linear conversations, and what actually happens is that they branch. Google Wave’s message-board-like paradigm is simply better, and more flexible (e.g., not limited to a single enterprise!) than Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.
• The instant messaging problems Google Wave purports to solve are also major. Instant messaging is slow, tedious, disjointed, and ephemeral. Fully integrating IM with email solves most of those problems. And Google Wave’s UI interactivity solves most of the rest.
• Twitter needs to be integrated with other forms of communication. What’s more, Twitter’s functionality needs to be drastically extended. Google Wave is the best hope I know of to meet those needs.  Enterprise Twitter is just a special case of that.
• Workgroups (enterprise or otherwise) need light-weight mini-portals that can be created on the fly by non-technical users, to ease collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint, SAP Rooms, et al. don’t really meet that need.  Google Wave could.
• In particular, collaboration on documents, presentations and so on needs to be more cloud-based and generally easier than is the case in Microsoft Office. Google Wave has the potential to provide that.
• Google + open source is a potentially potent combination, especially versus Microsoft.

One note: Google of course needs to improve the reliability and customer service of its cloud-based offerings to make a huge dent in Microsoft’s market. But even with its flaws Google has already been a good alternative for a while.

As for the “natural language” angle: At the 44:30 mark of the main Google Wave video is a demo of some cool, very grammar-sensitive spell-checking technology. Google’s spell-checking technology is further discussed in a separate, short video.  The basic idea is that Google uses its vast library of web pages — and email and chat? — not just to model intended word usage but also kinds of mis-spelling behavior as well.

The implications for Twitter’s security are not good. The best way to disable or remove this malware is, as I write this, not yet clear, but I hope to get clarity and update the post linked above accordingly.

• Twouble with Twitters is a hugely popular, slickly executed cartoon video.
• The Twitter Song is a funny song that happens to be better musically than most satirical songs.

But I’m still waiting for a Twitter-related takeoff on “The Trouble With Tribbles” …

• A Google acquisition of Twitter
• Some other kind of relationship built around real-time search

I have three initial thoughts on this:

1. Clearly, in Google’s mission to “organize all the world’s information,” there are several web areas it isn’t yet doing well in, and one of those is microblogs. What’s more, much as in the case of YouTube, it’s hard to see how Google would do that organizing any time soon unless it owned or otherwise was in bed with the leading platform for that kind of content — i.e., Twitter.

2. The YouTube example is apt in another way as well — it’s not clear where the monetization would come from. Google famously doesn’t make much advertising revenue from YouTube. And Twitter is even worse as an advertising platform; sticking ads into the tweetstream would quickly drive users elsewhere, and any other advertising scheme would likely fail because of the broad variety of interfaces — such as various mobile phones — Twitterers use to get at the service.

3. I’ve been suggesting all along that Twitter needs radical user experience enhancements. But when has Google ever made made user experience enhancements to a service? Its core search engine always looks pretty much the same. Ditto GMail. Ditto Blogger. Ditto YouTube.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

*Care and feeding of celebrity tweeters. Celebrity tweeting is actually a subject I’ve written and even been interviewed about several times.

As of this writing, the full list is:

Job Title	Location	Department
Operations Engineer	Technical Operations
Operations Engineer – Search	Technical Operations
Product Manager	Product
Product Manager – Platform (Consumer Internet)	Product
Product Manager – Search	Product
UI Designer/Developer	Product
User Experience Designer	Product
Communications Associate (Contract to FTE)	G&A
Founder Associate	G&A
Software Engineer – Business Intelligence	Engineering
Software Engineer – Front-End	Engineering
Software Engineer – Ruby on Rails	Engineering
Software Engineer – Search	Engineering
Software Engineer – Systems	Engineering
Software Engineer – Systems Spam	Engineering
Director, Strategic Partnerships	Business Development
Japan Country Manager	Business Development

Related link

• Twitter’s analytics job opening

[Plinky] is like throwing a cocktail party, getting the conversation going, then encouraging your guests to run out in the street with megaphones spreading their drunken chatter. Except in this case what people are drunk on is not actual booze, but rather the promise of “social media marketing” and “building your personal brand.”

Twitter is a communication platform, not a marketing platform, and there’s a subtle difference.

But I’d disagree that there’s a bright line separating the two.  In particular, I think most business blogs serve or should serve as both, in no small part because the areas of marketing and communication overlap heavily. And in my opinion Twitter (microblogging) and ordinary blogging aren’t that far apart.

Earlier this evening I posted praise of the BI expert Twitter community — of which Daniel is indeed a member — even while admitting that unlike other members, I “follow” too many Twitterers to actually keep up with their posts.  Daniel refers to following patterns like mine as an attention Ponzi scheme, on the theory that people are following so many others in the pretense of paying attention to them, hoping to get real attention in return.

The first problem with that clever phrase is that Daniel is misusing the term “Ponzi scheme” to refer to an unrelated type of fraud. More seriously, it seems to assume that the only legitimate use of Twitter — or more precisely of following people on Twitter — is for full community engagement.  I dispute that assumption.  While I don’t follow tweetstreams in real time very often, I do occasionally dip in when I’m in the mood. And when I do, I prune my followee list for my own purposes.

I really wish the Twitter experience could be better filtered, into more manageable groups of people, topics, etc. But I’m not aware of any adequate software that does the job.  (Tweetdeck is horrific, or at least was when I regrettably tried to use it, in that you can’t temporarily close a group without losing all the entries in it forever.) In the mean time, there is a multitude of worthwhile ways to use Twitter.

*In retrospect that was a silly comment, made soon after midnight while humans were generally either partying or asleep. But it’s the set-up for the rest of this post.

Sheer self-indulgence aside — “Happy Birthday To Me!!” — I see something blogworthy in that. Indeed, it reflects the emergence over the past 6 months or so of one particular Twitter community. Takeaways include:

1. The responders weren’t a randomly selected subset from among those of my 1304 Twitter followers online when I tweeted. Every person who responded is an industry analyst, a BI expert, or both.

Yes Virginia, there are some enterprise IT folks on Twitter.

2. Members of the community seem to follow each other’s tweetstreams in their entirety. Many of their tweets are in direct reply to or otherwise inspired by each other. Indeed, based on the timing, I suspect a lot more folks were inspired by Neil Raden’s message to me than by my original post.

3. Unlike me, these other folks seem to keep their followee lists small enough to engage with. 100ish numbers of people followed is not uncommon. By way of contrast, I follow 1682 people, which means that despite considerable care about who I follow, I wind up almost never actually checking what the tweetstream contains. (Instead, I usually just tweet something and react to the @replies.)

I no doubt like the charming Claudia Imhoff at least as well as she likes me. Even so, if there were a group of tweets about her birthday, I might well miss it — especially at first — just because I follow too many people to keep up.   More on that point in another post (coming soon).

4. Twitter is really just another venue for the evolution of an already-extant community. The independent BI analysts tend to travel as a pack anyway, to venues such as TDWI and Teradata Partners conferences, or to local gettogethers they hold in Colorado.

5. But Twitter does help that community evolve. I’ve really been brought into the club via Twitter. For example, the conversations that led to my teaching at the next TDWI Conference grew out of an email from Wayne Eckerson to the effect “Hi. I follow you on Twitter, and generally read your stuff. Can you help with a particular hardcore DBMS technology question I’ve run into?”

6. Twitter connections are useful. Twitter has made it easier for me to have offline conversations with Claudia, Wayne et al. My user-focused consulting services will be much richer for that.

Six months ago I felt that Twitter was dominated by the “new-age” tech folks — search engine optimizers, podcasters, social media consultants, Web 2.0 gurus and the like. But in one particular enterprise area — business intelligence — traditional IT folks are active as well. Perhaps similar ones will emerge in other areas of IT too.

1. Reporting on your life. By the way, I had a great first week in Grand Cayman, but now it’s raining heavily, which is a big part of the reason why I’m blogging.  Broadband is slow and my laptop is old, so being online is a bit frustrating, so I’m cutting a few corners in thoroughness.
2. Expressing feelings. That’s pretty inseparable from #1.
3. Bashing those who you feel need bashing. It works, too.
4. Communicating news.
5. Expressing analytical opinions.
6. Promoting your services, opinions, and links.

*More precisely, Hodson was underrating the use cases for a version of Twitter that actually works, but I’ll try to refrain from posting at length again about that problem until I’ve looked into the changes at recent Twitter acquisition Summize.  That said, I think it will take Twitter quite a while, if it ever does, to recover from the terrible loss of momentum due to its lack of scalability.  Certainly my usage has dropped to near zero since the disastrous period in which they disabled the Replies search.