Blogs @ Relative Progress

From the looks of our 7-day outlook we’ll be receiving a much needed break from our seasonal monsoonal weather pattern.  After today we’ll be drying out and our characteristically late season heat wave will come in with a vengeance.  I for one welcome it. I was born and raised in the south so I am more equip to deal with the uncharacteristic humidity then other native New Mexicans. That does mean I enjoy it.

As other parts of the state in the more rural corners dry out from flooding I can’t help but to contrast this event with the recent monsoons that have tragically ravaged parts of Pakistan. The scale may be larger, but results in such tragedy is always the same – an unfortunate loss of life.  The flooding around here yielded 1 fatality as compared with 1100, however we are not nearly as populated as Pakistan.  The only event is recent history on the same geographic scale would be the Tennessee floods of this Spring. Say what you will about government failure of even the sad state of our municipal governments, we still handle such acts-of-god fairly well (even Hurricane Katrina). Contrast this with the massive loss of life in Pakistan with the growing humanitarian disaster and I for one say GOD BLESS AMERICA.  Thank god for our prosperity, protocols and people for handling these things when everything else breaks down.  From earthquakes to Hurricanes,  where would you rather live when disaster strikes? Here or in Pakistan?

After much agony (and drinking) I have finally come to grips with the demise of Google Wave. It was for all intents and purposes very ambitious and I commend them for taking such a huge leap. Collaboration software was not even an after thought to the wider web world before Wave. Sure if you were a developer you had Basecamp or if you where in a corporate setting Microsoft Sharepoint, but to a normal web user there were Feeds, Walls, IM along with email and never the sum shall mix. Now collaboration is all the rave and even Enterprises are starting to pay attention. We can indirectly thank Wave for this.

Most articles and posts I’ve seen online have pointed to the fact that the underlying technology was amazing, but its marketing and execution where far from it. We should also be happy that lots of the technologies and architecture of Wave will start migrating into other Google products soon, as Eric Schmidt alluded to in this interview. Wave was way ahead of its time. It was a solution in search of a problem, a problem that we’ll soon see rear its ugly head in my opinion.  Its place in history (not matter how brief) will forever change the way of communication eventually, but not as a stand alone product. But alas this is what Google is known for.  The creative destruction that leaves jilted lovers at a Las Vegas alter. I feel for the developers that were left in the lurch with projects and development efforts built around this revolutionary communications platform. Those that us whom invest passion and evangelized about doing things the “Wave” way are also saddened. Most of all I feel sorry for myself. I should not have invested so much time and energy in thinking about the potential of this product. It was nothing more than a product, but I too fell for the siren song of advocacy. Shame on me.

What worries me most about this is how often Google’s track record leads to the same roads of failure. Building community around anything social is not in its DNA.  Jaiku(Twitter predecessor) and Dodgeball(Foursquare predecessor are part of a growing list of Google snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Maybe Google should focus on mobile and the utility of search and leave the social to the new kids on the block. But I fear the dogs of war have been unleashed as Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, has been tapped to turn the HMS Google toward a social course. I suspect the killing of Wave was partly his idea. There is good reason for it though. As Google stated in its blog post (more like a eulogy) Wave had not gotten the adoption and acceptance they wanted. This was mostly of their own doing, but the time for finger pointing is over and failure is failure. Google Me or whatever the hell they call it better be worth it. This post goes out to Thomas Beverley and the folks at Wave.to makers of the Mr. Ray bot that brought much needed integration with the outside web to Wave. To Alfredo Abambres who build his whole business on Wave and who I was honored to help in the his RITMO virtual Wave conference earlier this year. To Luciano Santa Brigida who got me excited about Wave all over again and shares my vision for wave as a federated protocol for mass real-time communication. All these folks were great and I was glad to meet them (virtually) on this platform.

With Wave now riding off into the sunset I have begun to re-evaluate what I’ve been contributing to these products. I sometimes put so much time and effort into these technologies I forget what they are used for. How much original thought and content have you given Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, Wave, etc?  Through these services I have found my voice and started a blog because of them.   So I have decided to take a little break from engagement in Buzz  (and other social platforms) for a bit.  First, I feel a little burn by Wave going the way of FriendFeed. Why invest so much and choose the wrong horse in the race when it’s double or nothing?  I’ll focus more on my blogging and my family and less on engaging in the fickleness of the social web. I  love Buzz, but I feel that anything or subject worth deeply engaging can be best done from my blogs me.relativeprogress.com or blogs.relativeprogress.com.   I’m not leaving forever, but I will be throttling down what I do here for a bit. The closure of Wave has made me look carefully at more open and federated approaches to doing things socially on the web. Posterous and Tumblr are great examples of what I would want from a Google Me. Diaspora and OneSocialWeb are two other example of where I want Google Social to go also, but I fear we will never get there. Hopefully from the ashes of this latest failure will rise the Google Me that will be all things to all people. Given the track record I doubt it. See you all later.

Over the past couple days I have started to see an slight exodus of hearts and minds from Buzz users as life, its stresses and noise take time away from some folks engaging. I also see more and more of the folks I follow pimp other social networks like Miio, the new social messaging darling, as well. Some followers such as @Alfredo Abambres and @Larry Anderson are toning down their Buzz interactions altogether. The common thread among their reasoning, noise. Google stumbled out of the gate with Buzz and appeared to be getting its groove back, but a strange thing happen on the way to building this Gmail-only echo chamber. The rest of the web caught up and started to seduced the flock. Now I ain’t going anywhere anytime soon because I still find Buzz compelling and engaging, even if the noise is starting to make things a bit unbearable. @Alfredo Abambres and @Larry Anderson both brought valid concerns about trying to wade through the often flood of Google Reader post (I’m guilty of that too) and the constant unsolicited, unidentifiable followers (or Brad Pitt). They haven’t solved that problem obviously. And where is our curation by way of lists or groups?  I can’t do Larry’s blog post justice so check out a more detailed reasoning of why he is cutting back on Buzz.  Poor @Alfredo Abambres missed a vital communicate with one of his flock buried under all the junk. While an @ mention would have solved that problem, the lack of groups is puzzling. I can at least do some kind of curating in Twitter via lists. Hell even the upstart Miio can do this. There is little (or no intuitive) method of segregating groups of friends on Buzz. This is even stranger being that smart people within Google have described this very social norm of having different groups of friends online and offline in real-life (remember that). Paul, are you talking to the Google Buzz team?

This brings me to my overall point about all things “social”.  Social networks are faddish at best and have a tendency to be cliquey like real life. Human beings have a nasty habit of acting out its very nature.  Gone are the days of having the time to get the launch of a new social service right. No you see if you screw the pooch out of the gate and don’t iterate with one update a week your toast. Social platforms are filled with the fickle that want it to work now. Buzz was sticky at first then it became work for most of us. A constant stream of moving comments that make it hard to keep up (and I hate it when I am making a damn comment and the stream updates). As the amount of people increase their presence on Buzz the noise (and spam) increases are directly proportional. Lost in the stream were relevant comments of some importance that we don’t necessarily get in our inbox. Maybe this is simply a growing pain of an infant service. Maybe it’s early adopter leaving for something new perhaps. If the Google Buzz team doesn’t start addressing the noise issue soon you will see a lot more Alfredo’s and Larry’s leaving the service.

This week is the premiere of the audio edition of my randomness.