What is Google Wave?

So, you might have heard a lot of talk/posts going around lately referring to Google Wave. So what is this “Google Wave” everyone is talking about?

It is a beta service from Google, hosted at http://wave.google.com, which currently is only available to 100,000 people. Those people are having their invitations sent to them by Google as a preview of the service. It is expected that the service will go live in X amount of time, possibly after they have determined that the system presents a low rate of bugs, and can hold up to the excessive demand on their servers (We don’t wait it dying like Gmail, do we now?).

According to Google Wave’s short about page, a Wave is the following:

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

However, Wikipedia goes on to explain a little more in depth what Google Wave is:

• Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.

So I hope this has cleared any confusion as to what the service is, what we can expect from it, and how reliable it is going to be. We all have our fingers crossed that it will turn out to be what we expected (and that it wont fall down as much as Gmail).

Social Media Revolution… A fad or to stay?

I was a bit skeptical of all the attention placed on Social Media when it started booming not long ago. I wasn’t sure if it was something that’s going to stay, or if it is just a fad that’s going to fade. The following video was something I found on Steve Farnsworth’s Digital Marketing Mercenary Blog.

Steve Writes “A challenge for most senior marketing professionals who cut their teeth any time before, say, last year has been to fully grasp the impact of social media on how they perform their job. The new many-to-many communications model forces everyone to re-imagine their tools, role, and strategies.”

On September 23rd The Silicon Valley Brand Forum held an event on the impact of social media on branding. The morning opened with this viral video that uses powerful statistics and visuals to hammer home that this is not your dad’s Internet.

So is Social Media here to stay? Or is it just a fad? What is your take on this?

Social Media and Marketing… Where are we?

Where are we today regarding Social Media and Marketing?

Social Interaction: Lego People

Advances in Social Media are changing the way we market our products, services, or ourselves. It’s not all about *the logo* any more, it’s not about what your company represents, it’s about what your customers represent to you, it’s about how will your customers benefit from your service, and how can you learn from their experiences to build up on your products, and deliver better service.

One platform isn’t the future. One platform isn’t even better than another. A platform is a tool, and us marketers must know how to use these tools to reach our customers, without aimlessly devoting everything towards one specific platform. Today it might be Twitter and Facebook, tomorrow Google Wave, and the next day who knows, but we must always keep in mind that it’s the person that makes the platform useful, not the platform that makes the person useful.

Chris Brogan is an expert. I don’t usually call someone an expert unless I really mean it. He recently gave a speech at New Media Atlanta (which I obviously did not attend to), and he just posted the video capture for the whole speech on his blog. If you have a spare hour I recommend you give it a good listen.

So what are your thoughts about Social Media? Where do we go from here?

The City of Edinburgh

A few days ago I had the opportunity to stroll a little around the city. I wasn’t overloaded with work so I went around with my camera taking a few near StockBridge (north-ish Edinburgh). They are not many, but I hope you enjoy them anyway.

Karma Police – 7/8 Radiohead Cover

My 7/8 Signature Version of Karma Police. Watch + Comment Here.