Pundit Country

Admittedly, I don;t write often about social technology threads, despite the fact that I read about them all the time, but MG Siegler over at TechCrunch has really stumbled onto something with his analysis of the potential of Google’s newest product, the Wave.

It’s been written more than a few times that Wave is what email would be if it was invented now rather than some twenty years ago, but Siegler sees some far deeper in how the product operates:

That’s absolutely true. But that also implies that we want some sort of always-on communication connection. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we want the option to communicate in real-time at will, but also the ability to communicate at our leisure at times. I would consider this to be a desire for a “passive-agressive” method of communication. Perhaps it would be better stated as a “passive/active” method of communication, but passive-aggressive sounds better, so we’ll go with that.

I would consider email to be a passive form of communication. I don’t mean that you don’t respond to it, I mean that you don’t have to respond to it right away. Instant messaging is at the other end of the spectrum. If used correctly, it’s supposed to be an “aggressive” or “active” form of communication in which you respond immediately. Twitter is very passive because the use of it is such that people don’t even necessarily expect a response of any kind, even if they point a message at you. Facebook is a mixture of all of those things (more on that below).

Google Wave is attempting to be a passive-agressive form of communication. You can actively (aggressively) engage in threads in real-time, or you can sit back and let messages come to you at your leisure (passively). Having used the product for a few months now, and after using it quite a bit more actively with my friends these past few days, I really think that Wave is onto something with this method of communication. I would argue that Google Wave’s new message alert system needs to be somewhat reworked or re-imagined, but I do think the desire to blend passive and agressive methods of communicating is there.

While I’ve only used Wave for a short time (actually less than 24 hours), I can see where he’s going with this and at this stage in its development, I would tend to agree with him. But you should go and read the whole piece for yourself, which is located right here.

Related articles

• Email is Dead? Oh Really? [Rants] (gizmodo.com)
• MG Goes Gaga Over Google Wave On TV (techcrunch.com)
• Video: 3.5% Of Google Wave Explained (techcrunch.com)
• Google Wave could threaten Facebook, Twitter (computerworld.com)
• The Human/Machine Continuum of the Real-Time Web (Chart) (readwriteweb.com)