Clippings, Words and Zettelkasten (150)

from source

scaling of adoption (number of users)

Needleman: It's fun to play with now, but we don't know what using Wave will be like once we start getting overflowing inboxes of waves.

Shankland: Right. Every Net communication technology goes through a honeymoon period where just you and your close contacts use it. Then the whole Net discovers it and your little paradise becomes just another conduit for spam, inane jokes, and trivia. Expect the same issues with Wave.

scaling of attention "shifts" (interruptions)

Needleman: The thing everyone is going to make a big deal of in Wave is that you can interrupt someone who's carefully writing a message to you. You can barge into a message before they're done with it, demand the writer's immediate attention, and force them to shift from composing to replying. There will be a way to hide your real-time activity in Wave, but the default mode is real-time. It's interruptive and very different. There will be people who hate it.

We used Wave to write this story. It worked pretty well.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Shankland: In my misspent youth, I used a Unix terminal command, talk, that was something of a precursor to instant messaging. I quickly grew to loathe the fact that every keystroke was visible. How many times have you had second thoughts about an instant message or e-mail? Think before you type.

Needleaman: I'm in trouble. I don't only think before I type. I think before, during, and after. My mother taught me that "writing is re-writing." I hope Wave doesn't prove her wrong.

Is this about granularity of spending attention?

make it into a frothy and superficial back-and-forth.

It also brings together different communication styles--e-mail, IM, chat, collaborative editing--into one app. I think that's great, but I'm not sure how well this idea will scale or what will happen as a broader user base starts to adopt it.

Google must convince people not only to sign up for Wave, but also to get their contacts to do so as well, which probably will be as much of a challenge as making the technology work. But the company is more likely to get ahead in the social realm by doing something different, like Wave, as it did with Gmail, and not by trying to out-Twitter Twitter or out-Facebook Facebook.