Since Google Wave is expected to have a limited release on September 30th, it is time to get an understanding of what this tool is, how it works, why it is revolutionary and how we might use it.

What it is?

Announced by Google on May 27th, 2009 as a “personal communication and collaboration tool”, Google Wave is the next big “death of email” hype storm.  As an open source application, it is available for others to develop it out via it’s API – much like Twitter with it’s endless supply of third party apps or add-ons for your Firefox browser.  File sharing is native to it so you can drag photos and docs right into conversations – no more email attachments.  Everything is real time with threaded conversations, wiki-style editing and the ability to embed a Wave into your own website or blog.  While definitely a tool that can define the future of online communication, it also could be another layer to the social media onion.

If you want to make waves, you need to get in the pool!

How does it work?

Users create “waves” and add other users to it – much like starting an email to a friend or group of people.  But instead of a back and forth volley or text with attachments to upload and download, everyone shares a common pool of media – text, photos, videos, documents, RSS feeds, gadgets, etc.  New users can be added to the pool and continue to contribute in real-time.  And if you’re added to the pool late and don’t have the foggiest idea what everyone is currently talking about, you can replay the wave from the beginning to watch the timeline of events unfold before you.

Why is it revolutionary?

Currently, our online communications are very fragmented – Email, Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, file sharing websites, social networking sites and more.  Some of these technologies, like email and instant messaging are pretty ancient in their technology.  Newer communications, such as Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites provide a richer experience, but are still spread over a diverse landscape.  You can use third party tools to aggregate some of these web 2.0 tools together (Ping.fm, Seesmic Desktop and FriendFeed to name a few), but none of these wrap the whole enchilada within their tortilla.  Google Wave is the whole enchilada served straight from their coding kitchen.

How will we use it?

The primary use for it of course, is for online communications and file sharing.  Whether you are creating a wave to discuss the football season with friends, share photos with family members or collaborate on a project with a client, it could be the go-to tool that truly does spell the end of email.  However, since it is open sourced for the developer community at large, new uses not yet imagined are sure to be developed – think iPhone apps.

The Google Wave web app

The key is adaption.

The biggest hurdle with any new technology is that it has to be adapted by the general public to succeed.  Just being better doesn’t guarantee the public will embrace it.  Google Wave has it’s own lengthy list of jargon terms and from-scratch approach to the user interface.  While Twitter has gained a huge following with it’s unique approach to communication, it only requires a small learning curve and a few silly-sounding jargon terms to learn such as “tweet” and “retweet”.  Google Wave is a bit more complex and abstract.  There are still lots of people who haven’t figured out Twitter (or email, for that matter), so I see a high rate of avoidance being inevitable.  And if someone isn’t using Google Wave, then you obviously can’t communicate with them via the tool.

So what about this new jargon?

Wave: Since this term mirrors the name of the product offering, it makes sense that it is the primary element of the new technology.  A wave is the full history of a conversation thread or project collaboration.

Wavelet: A subset of a wave – basically consisting of related elements of the full wave.

Blip: Single elements of a wavelet, such as individual messages.  Blips can be private or publically shared.

Children: Blips that are attached to other blips.

Document: A blip’s content.

Extension: Applications that extend the functionality of Google Wave.  There are 2 extension types that can be used: gadgets and robots.

Gadgets: This would be like add-ons that you can install into your Firefox browser to increase it’s functionality and to customize it’s usability.

Robots: Yeah, really – robots!  Basically extensions that provided automated processes.

Google Wave: a stand alone tool or embed it elsewhere.

One of the things that increased the popularity of YouTube is it’s ability to provide embed code that you can use to post YouTube videos on other websites and blogs.  This dramatically helped to spread the brand awareness and site content to thousands, if not millions, of URL’s throughout the internet.  Similarly, waves can be embedded elsewhere on the net.

In conclusion:

Google Wave has the clout and resources of Google, the anxious anticipation of millions and a fresh (if somewhat different) approach to online communication going for it.  It may not be adopted by all – or in my opinion end fragmentation of online communication totally – but it does give us a chance to explore the next evolution of the web.  Even in the unlikely event that it fails miserably, it is already setting a new course that other online applications will follow.

Additional Resources:

Here is a highly abridged version of the video presented by Google on the waves.google.com website.  The original is long – very long.  This 10 minute abridged version sums it up:

Here is the link to sign up with Google for an invite to use Google Wave: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

They may be good at being social, but they need to work on their bookmarking features.

Ok, here is the setup of my premise:

I’m primarily a Firefox web surfer and for the last year or so I have been a big fan of the the Fast Dial add-on.  If you don’t know what it is, basically it adds a bookmark page to your Firefox browser.  Every time you bookmark a page to Fast Dial, it grabs a screen capture of the page and places it on the Fast Dial grid.  The grid can contain as many or as few rows and columns as you want.  Plus you can replace the screen shot with any image you want to use.  I tend to use the logo of the site I bookmarked, so if I want to go to Facebook, I open a new tab in my Firefox browser and from the Fast Dial grid that pulls up by default, I quickly see the blue Facebook logo and click to be on my way.  It’s fast indeed as it is visual.

Now you wouldn’t use Fast Dial to bookmark all the sites you visit as there is only so much room on your computer screen.  That great recipe for peppered porcupine pie that one day you to plan to make, or the interesting blog article you’ll one day get around to reading are not the things you would bookmark to Fast Dial.  The day-to-day sites you use on a regular basis are what you would put on your Fast Dial grid.

For everything else, you can bookmark them to your browser, but then you have to go back to that browser on that computer to access them.  Yes, I know there are ways to sync, port over and mishmash bookmarks in browsers now, but let’s not pull out all those ‘many ways to cook a porcupine’ recipes right now.  I have looked into Delicious.com a few times over the last few years, but always found their user interface a bit cryptic.  I have tried other services too, but they were way more social-oriented than bookmark-oriented.

Example screenshot of Fast Dial

Now, after building up a pretty big grid on both my work computer and home computer in Fast Dial, recent upgrades to Firefox 3.5 yielded blank grids.  Gone.  All my bookmarks vanished.

So, now I’m back to considering a good web-based bookmarking service.  I have a Google account and have used their bookmarking service, but I don’t like the idea of logging into my Google account at work and leaving all that personal data from the entire Google suite open, plus it’s not visual like Fast Dial.  Hey, it’s a Web 2.0 world, I’m sure some 15 year old has a startup site that will fit my needs.  So off a Googling I went.  I even Binged.  Nothing.

Looks like I need to look into Delicious again.  So I gave in and setup an account.  Guess what – it’s still cryptic.

Here’s my problem with social booking services:

I am a website consultant by trade.  Website usability is a big part of my consulting.  To me, the goal of a bookmarking service is to quickly get to the links I need quickly… did I already say “quickly”?  Yes I did, but let me say it again: quickly.  Start building up a bookmark list in Delicious, or any other bookmark service, and you get lists.  Text lists.  Yippee.

Now with Delicious.com, I can customize the bookmark name, add comments and tag the bookmark, but it’s still a text list.  And tags.  If I can only remember what tag a bookmark is listed under.  Tags are great, but give me some good old fashioned categories too.  If we dropped a site visitor into a website with a large number of pages and said “here’s a tag cloud, have at it”, we wouldn’t have a successful website.  With bookmark tags, there’s too much thinking on the data entry of the bookmark side and too much thinking on the link picking side.

Here’s my solution:

There is no reason a visual experience can’t be achieved in today’s web environment.  And to show you I’m not just here to criticize, here are my ways to allow users to organize their data visually.

But first of all, just to get this out of the way, if you’re going to provide user accounts, allow a custom user profile image.  Why is every person on Delicious a pointy-nosed icon.  There is no meaning for the icon if it’s everyone.  Look at other social websites with user profiles for a clue.

Ok, let’s organize our bookmarks visually.

There are a number of ways to organize visually: image icons, size, color and location.  Let’s start with image icons.

Image Icons: I don’t know what browser you are using, but chances are there is an image icon to the immediate left of the URL in the address bar.  This is the site’s favicon – the site owner has picked an image icon to represent the site.  Since it is a small image, it might be only a part of the site logo or other element, but it presents enough visual feedback for you to know what site it represents.  Now if the site owner didn’t use a favicon for their site, you would just see a generic icon, such as the blank document icon.  Why am I bringing up the favicon?  In many bookmarking tools, the favicon will show next to the bookmarked link.  For example, viewing my Firefox bookmarks (yes, I have bookmarks everywhere) I see all the favicons next to each bookmark name.  This makes it much easier to quickly find what I’m looking for instead of just looking at text links.  Additionally, I have a bookmarks toolbar that I have customized to only view favicons for bookmarked sites (kinda like a mini Fast Dial).  As long as every site bookmarked has a favicon,  I can open a site by visually just by finding it’s icon.  Social bookmarking sites should at the least show favicons for bookmarked sites.  Even better, they such allow displaying a screenshot of the site and allowing users to upload their own images for each bookmark.

Size: While I’m not a big fan of tag clouds, I respect the fact that they recognize that size helps to determine importance of a keyword.  The same would be good for a bookmarking website.  Take the Fast Dial grid idea (which really is the same idea as the iPhone’s icon navigation grid) of arranging your most important bookmarks on your main login page – sizing them according to importance. Not drastic differences, but enough to show certain bookmark links have more weight to them.  Or if you can paginate the bookmarks based on certain criteria, you can view one category of bookmarks and quickly see what items in the category are the most important.   Optionally, you could select a setting that instead of you manually selecting sizes, it increases icon sizes based on how often you visit the bookmark.  I can see a friendly reminder pop up now that says “Hey, this bookmark is getting so small it’s about to become invisible.  You sure you still need it?”

Color: Many online tools let you arrange items by color.  Google Calendar lets me setup different calendars to organize events.  Each calendar can be a different color.  Why not a color coding system for bookmarks?

Location: Whether by category, tag, or individual bookmarks, placing items in particular places is a way to determine the importance of a bookmark.  In Fast Dial or my iPhone, I can arrange my navigation however I see fit.  Certain categories always show on the right and another group of tagged bookmarks show in the bottom left – cool.  Work-related bookmarks always show up on main screen at login and personal bookmarks always require a click to a seperate page – awesome – now users can use one bookmark login for both work and personal.  Or, to take a quick sidebar, how about work-related bookmarks always show up on the main screen and personal bookmarks requiring a seperate, or a reconfirmation of the password to access.  This way, you can login with your same bookmark account at work that you use at home, leaving it open throughout the day without worrying about co-workers checking out your obscure 80’s band video links on YouTube or your vast array of porcupine pie recipes when you head to lunch.

Ok, so I’m ending on a sidebar.

Have I missed a social bookmarking site that does more than I’m giving them credit for?

Screenr is a new online application is available that makes it easy to share screencast videos via Twitter.

“What’s a screencast?”, you ask.

It is when a user can create a video of what is happening on their computer screen while providing a voice over dialog via a plugged in microphone.  They are typically used to create training videos, but they can serve other purposes too.

The service is quite ingenious in it’s ease of use.  Just go to the site and click the “Record your screencast now” button.  Once complete, the site connects with your Twitter account using OAuth and sends a tweet to all your followers with a link to the video that Screenr hosts for you.  Oh, and it is web-based, so there is nothing to download.  The web just keeps getting sweeter!

Now that the hype has settled and the new website smell has faded, let’s take a look at Twitter and how to maximize it’s effectiveness via third party Twitter tools.  These tools come in various forms; from websites, desktop apps to mobile phone applications, there are many ways to get your tweets in order.

Seesmic Desktop, along with Tweetdeck, is one of the exciting Adobe Air desktop apps to try for Twitter.

Multi-Account Management

Twitter is a great tool, but their website is pretty simple – and that has it’s pros and cons.  The pros being the ease of using it.  For casual Twittering, it handles most of what you need.  But what if you have a personal Twitter account and a work Twitter account – or even more Twitter accounts to promote various aspects of your business.  Now having various browsers open to manage all those accounts at once is not efficient – time for a tool that allows you to manage multiple accounts at once in one user interface.  Their are numerous choices out there, but the ones I recommend looking into the most are HootSuite.com, TweetLater.com, TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and Twhirl.  All these tools are fantastic to easily post a tweet from different accounts without switching browsers or logging in and out of the Twitter website.

Beautiful interface, great features, lots of fun to use - HootSuite is a hoot!

Following more than a few hundred people on Twitter but have only a handful whose tweets you really want to read?  TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop let you group those you follow into smaller more manageable lists.  You could create a list just of family members and friends, just of business contacts or whatever other criteria you wish.  Then you can just view one of these lists so it is easily to see these posts without them getting lost in the Twitter stream.

One of the biggest problems I have with Twitter is having the time to Tweet.  My day is busy and I can’t spend my time at work managing my Tweets.  This is where TweetLater.com and HootSuite.com shine.  You can load up a number of interesting tweets when you have 15 minutes available and schedule these tweets to get spread out throughout the day.  Now you can look like you’re busy tweeting throughout the day!  Busy Twitterers are more likely to gain more followers and get more visibility within their current Twitter network.  HootSuite.com even allows you to track stats of your post’s links so you can find out how many people are clicking on the links you are sharing.

Manage Followers/Unfollows

When you get to hundreds of followers, at some point you’ll realize you are following a lot of people you don’t really need to be following.  Maybe you followed them simply because they followed you.  But their posts have nothing to offer you or are so infrequent you never see them.  You try and track them down in your followers list, but all that scrolling through pages is not an effective use of your time.  With a tool like Twitter Karma, you can easily see all your followers and those you are following on one page.  And unlike the Twitter website, you can see at a glance if the following is mutual.  What’s that, that person you were thinking of unfollowing is not following you anymore anyway – Twitter Karma is a good way to find those tricky individuals that follow you first to get you to follow you back only to then unfollow you afterwards to make their numbers look better.

Twitter Karma is an easy way to manage your friends and followers on Twitter.

Grade Your Performance

What is your influence on Twitter?  How do you rank overall?  Hubspot has a clever little tool to help you get an idea of your level of influence on Twitter.  Go to http://twitter.grader.com to see how you stack up.  This is mostly for fun, but you can pick up some tips on increasing your Twitter influence and find other Twitter users of interest in your area.  Best of all, it gives you a goal to try and beat which encourages more Twitter activity.

Secure Your Tweets

You have to have a backup plan for when things go bad.  That Twitter Fail Whale could surface at any moment and eat your tweets and followers.  Stories have been told of users accounts getting wiped out, either in full or partially, for no other reason than a Twitter technical issue.  So, if you are investing valuable time in your Twitter account, then it makes sense to get it backed it just like any other valuable data you have.  A tool to do this easily is TweetBackup.com.

Share Media

Yep, you can do more than just share 140 characters on Twitter.  The most well know media sharing tool for Twitter is TwitPic which lets you share photos.  TwitVid.io is a newer one that lets you share video.  The video you share can be an uploaded video or one you take on the spot from your computer’s webcam.  You login to TwitVid.io using your Twitter login and post you video to Twitter directly from the TwitVid.io website.  Another cool service is TwitDoc.com which allows you to share files on Twitter.  It works in the same manner as TwitVid.io, but it also has a Desktop Application available.  Say you want to post a PDF document of a business flyer up for your followers to see, TwitDoc.com allows this – just make sure if you’re on the receiving end of a TwitDoc that it’s from a trusted source.

TwitVid.io - a good site to share video on Twitter.

Take Your Tweets With You

On the go a lot?  Have a smart phone?  Then get a Twitter application for your phone so you can Twitter from anywhere.  I can only speak for iPhone apps as that’s the phone I use, but I’m sure if your phone is smart, it has a Twitter app available.  The iPhone Twitter app I like best is TwitterFon.  It is easy to use and even ties into TwitPic if I want to tweet a photo from my phone.  Many of these apps are free, so try a few and decide for yourself.

Promote via Twitter

Got a great blog post or webpage?  Use TweetMeme.com to make it easier for your viewers to retweet the content by placing a TweetMeme “retweet” button on your blog or webpage.  If a viewer likes your info, they just need to click the “retweet” button to broadcast the content to their followers on Twitter.  In addition, your TweetMeme retweets get tracked and if you get enough viewers clicking on your TweetMeme retweet button you will get extra publicity on the TweetMeme website (can you say “Digg.com”).

Build Community

If you really want to connect with your Twitter community, try Mr. Tweet.  This is a great tool for two reasons; 1) you can recommend other Twitterers (people love getting recommendations) and 2) you can get recommendations of other Twitterers that you may wish to follow but aren’t yet.  When you recommend someone on Mr. Tweet, it is recorded on the site and you can also have your recommendation tweeted on Twitter.  Also, Mr. Tweet only looks to recommend people you should follow that have recommendations from others you already follow – in other words, recommendations from Mr. Tweet are really recommendations from those you already know on Twitter.  This leads to having a higher quality of overall friends in your Twitter stream.

I pity the fool who don't use Mr. Tweet.

Got More?

This is a very short list of all the Twitter-related tools that exist.  You may find some that work best for you differ from this list – if you do, tell me what it is and how you’re using it?

Surprisingly, it is not the kids that are doing all the Twittering – far from it.  New research shows it’s the middle age sector that is using it the most, and that means business – kids rank at the bottom of the list as the most common users of Twitter.  Full article from Web Pro News here:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/08/what-twitter-search-can-mean-for-businesses-0

A co-worker talked you into setting up an account on LinkedIn, which you briefly did, but then forgot about it and never followed up on it further.  It has a minimal amount of basic content on it and maybe you only linked up with a few other people at best.  Well, that basic profile is likely now one of the highest ranked webpages for your name in Google.  That’s a good reason to revisit that profile and freshen it up.

Social media websites are really starting to dominate search engine listings.  Social media profiles are getting top spots for individual names.  This is particularly true if your name is a somewhat less common.

Since your social media profile is likely one of the first things that will pull up in Google if someone is searching on your name, then make sure your profile is up-to-date and and complete.  If it is LinkedIn, they use a handy percentage meter to let you know how complete your profile is and what you need to fill out next.

Last Friday was the official launch of “The Brent and Brandi Show” – a collaborative online talkshow/podcast I am doing with Brandi Pierce, a website and branding specialist located in Seattle, Washington.  I met Brandi online on Biznik.com, a social networking website that is gaining popularity.  Brandi came up with the idea of a co-hosted podcast and was looking for the right co-host to help out.  Somehow I stuck out to Brandi and the invatation came my way.

Brandi first floated the idea to me in December and since then we have been working on putting the show together.  To actually have our first episode up is quite a treat!  What has been particularly interesting is the fact that we are located at extreme polar opposite ends of the country, so working through a 3 hour time difference via phone and email can sometimes get confusing.  But it makes for a nice East/West or even North/South contrast that makes things more interesting than if we were in the same location.

Our first show was on blogging for business – yep, it’s a business oriented talkshow that focuses on how to improve your business results via online marketing.  We already have growing list of guests for the show and a stockpile of information to share.  I hope you will join us live or check out our recorded shows after the fact as they become available.

The show is scheduled for every other Friday at 4pm PST and 1pm EST.  It is being broadcast on Talkshoe.com.

Facebook spent this week doing damage control for their over bearing change to their Terms of Service agreement.

Facebook Faces Member Smackdown

Basically, they where stating they changed their terms of service and any content you as a member have posted to the site, whether currently up or previously deleted, belonged to Facebook. There was no advance warning, just an “I’m sorry, it’s ours now”, so even if you didn’t agree with the new terms and quit, you were still out of luck.

So what’s the deal?

Likely it is just a move to protect themselves from lawsuits, in case someone’s content that isn’t supposed to be on Facebook is still cached somewhere in their network.  But others have questioned whether it is a huge power grab of content.  Either way, Facebook’s new terms of service agreement doesn’t add up, and most members concur on this fact.  So much so, that it appears as of this writing that the previous terms of service agreement is back up.

This will be an interesting case study for a while to come on content ownership on social media websites, brand management and the power of a large membership to influence business decisions.

So, you’re still thinking this whole blogging thing is silly? Yet you want your website to rank well and bring a lot of visitors to your website?

If these two statements apply to you, then truth be told, you’d be silly not to consider a blog.

Think of it this way – if you have an average sized website, say 10 content pages, then you have 10 pages that have a chance of being ranked in the search engines. Now, it is difficult for any page to effectively be optimized for more than a few keyword phrases – 3 is reasonable, although some would argue that even that number is high. That give us 10 pages and 30 keyword phrases. Now, add in the fact that the search engines like active websites, so if your site is static (only updated once every year or two), then your site is not keeping the search engine bots interested.

Now, let’s take those 10 static pages and 30 keyword phrases and add in a blog that you update only once a week with a new post. This adds 52 new pages over the course of a year and 156 keyword phrases that can populate the search engines. Plus, as an actively updated blog, the search engines will be eager to visit it on a regular basis and quick list any new content that you post. When you launch a new product, service, sale, coupon, marketing campaign, promotion, job listing, new office location, event or other news worthy item, your blog post about it will show up immediately in the search engines for searchers to find it. If your site has been static for a year, and you update the site to reflect a special sale coming up next week, it might not make it to the search engines in time – whereas, it may only take an hour for the blog to get listed.

Blogs are a “force multiplier”, to borrow a military term. Use all the artillery available to help you succeed with your business online.

Ok, I know this is a blog geared towards website development, SEO and online social media, but here is a cool tool that you can use for when you are meeting with new people at a networking event.  You know you are going to get that question “So, what do you do?”, so why not prepare a quick reply that sounds interesting, yet short and sweet.  It is easy with the Pitch Generating Tool from 15SecondPitch.com – just go to their website and follow the step-by-step directions.  In 10 minutes or less you’ll have an effective introduction to give at the next conference, Chamber gathering, business lunch or any other social occasional.