Buzz, Wave and Orkut have all raised some interest at their time, but never caught on with the masses. However, if Google manages to combine the best features of its previous ventures, the rumoured Facebook challenger ‘Google Me’ could prove to be the real deal, a PC World article speculates.

Google Buzz’s strength was its ability to incorporate location data into a social network. Its ability to be readily integrated with Google Maps proved a considerable competitive edge against Twitter and Foursquare.

Google Wave, the PC World article continues, might provide Google’s imminent social effort with a more interesting version of Facebook’s wall and messaging system.

Orkut, meanwhile, has a more ‘robust’ delete function than Facebook. And in Orkut, you can see how many people have clicked, viewed or trashed the items you have promoted.

According to the article, privacy is one of the key issues to tackle for a new social media platform – but also an opportunity. Facebook’s recent problems with confusing privacy settings and inconsistent approach towards privacy issues creates a chance for a new platform to shine.

To add to the mix, Google has recently acquired Jambool, a virtual currency platform, to make it easier for users to buy apps and games.

According to PC World, social gaming seems to be an important part of Google’s plans, as they already own also ‘Slide’, the developer of the hugely popular Farmville.

Read the full article here:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/203499/how_google_could_build_a_better_social_network.html

Launched last year at the Google I/O conference, the tool aimed to combine features from email and chat with multimedia content to make sharing and real-time collaborating easier.

“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked”, the search engine giant said in a company statement.

The development of Wave will no longer be continued but the tool will be maintained until the end of the year.

The move has sparked Wave fans to set up a protest site to persuade Google to change its mind. Despite the large-scale failure, Wave has managed to build up a small but loyal following.

The savegooglewave website appeals to keep the Wave alive:

“When we heard the news about Google Wave being shut down, we were devastated. Google Wave is an invaluable tool that we use every day to keep track and collaborate on projects (in real-time). Please help us to keep it alive and spread the word.”

The protest site has so far created over 32,000 likes and 1,142 tweets.

Source: Stuff.co.nz

Here are a couple we found interesting:

New ways for journalists to gather information

Social media blog Mashable’s reporter Vadim Lavrusik got a group of media professionals together to act as a ‘collective source’. Gina Chen, one of the participants, argues that apart from offering an easily accessible platform for a group discussion, the tool itself actually made the process more valuable than if all the participants had been interviewed separately.

And yes, she admits, the idea of interviewing people as a group isn’t new. But social media makes it a lot easier to facilitate this. And also, from a purely practical point of view, after a wave conversation the reporter doesn’t need to go through the lengthy process of transcribing a taped meeting or a group interview.

Organising day-to-day conversations in a small company

Based in different countries 8500 kilometers away from each other, a small company consisting of two people started using Wave to keep on top of their fragmented communication.

The problem for Caroline Dahllöf and Carolyn Uy, founders of Lyn And Line, was that a good part of their working day takes place while the other one is sleeping. They set up an individual wave for each project (no matter how small) which needs discussing.

“Unlike the clutter of emails that get saved in some folder, blips of information can be added to a particular wave wherever we need them to keep the conversation flowing and organised,” they described the benefits of a wave.

For Caroline and Carolyn, the beauty of the tool is that it notifies when a change has been made. So instead of going through an extra email summarising what has happened, each one can quickly glance through their inboxes in the morning to see what the other one has done.

Feature article

What went wrong with Google Wave?

Designed to merge emails, instant messaging, social networking and document sharing, Google’s “ultimate real-time collaboration tool” hasn’t been the success it was hoped to be. Read more…

Google Wave was announced a year ago in May with a great fanfare hailing it as “the next big step” in online communication. The beta testing stage in September complied with the company’s signature word-of-mouth approach designed to maximise the hype around the tool.

The start looked promising. At the peak of the hype, invitations were circling on eBay around £55.

But then it suddenly all fizzled out. A few weeks ago Wave was finally opened to the general public but the buzz is inarguably gone.

So what went wrong then?

“It’s that classic thing about new technologies, there needs to be a specific problem that it solves rather than trying to come up with things it could be used for”, Web 2.0 Consultant Trainer Steve Boneham says.

Steve is following closely the developments of emergent technologies and was recently involved in a project examining institutional use of Web 2.0 tools. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a natural place for Google Wave in that scene.

“While Google Wave undoubtedly has potential, personally, I haven’t yet found many times where I’ve thought that’s the best tool for the job.”

In theory, Wave should be every collaborator’s dream. A real-time platform that allows you to include all kinds of content – no more confusing email threads messing up project communication.

Chris Thomson, Steve’s colleague, says the potential is definitely there, but according to him, the exclusive nature of the launch may have cost Wave some of its future success.

“I think the tool suffered a lot from its closed beta stage. Not enough people had access to it to make it useful.”

Other benefits

Steve notes that despite it not yet being a huge success, Google Wave shouldn’t be flagged as a complete failure either.

“The technology behind Google Wave has been driving other things forward. Google had to change some of their underlying infrastructure in order to make Wave work and that has benefited other applications such as Google Docs”, he explains.”

A lot of the early criticism targeted Wave’s confusing user interface. Before releasing Wave to general public, Google made some revamps to the tool and is now hoping that the improved user experience, together with the wide availability, will attract more people to jump on board.

However, Chris points out, measuring the success of new tools and technologies isn’t always down to user numbers.

“There seems to be an expectation that in order for a new technology to be useful it has to draw huge amounts of users like Twitter and Facebook,” he said.

Case study

What could Google Wave be used for?

The official Google Wave blog outlines various examples of what can be done with the Wave. Fancy words like ‘creative collaboration’ keep cropping up, but the post does actually offer some useful real-life examples as well. Read more…