Google Wave is an amazing innovation that looks set to become the de facto standard for communicating online (eventually replacing email). Just in case you’re not sure what all this is about, here’s the video that got the whole world buzzing:

Google Wave developer preview video cheat sheet

In the video, by order of appearance:

Vic Gundotra – Vice President of Engineering at Google

Lars Rasmussen - Co-founder of Google Wave, also co-founder of Google Maps. Brother of Jens Rasmussen.

Stephanie Hannon – Lead Product Manager for Google Wave.

Jens Rasmussen – Co-founder of Google Wave, also co-founder of Google Maps. Brother of Lars Rasmussen.

Greg Dalesandre – Product Manager for Google Wave

Video timeline:

0:00:30 – Vic introduces the Google Wave project to the crowd

0:02:45 – Lars and Stephanie take to the stage

0:04:25 – Stephanie explains the 3Ps of Google Wave (Product, Platform, Protocol)

0:05:05 – Lars briefly explains how email works and how Google Wave will change the way we communicate

0:07:35 – Stephanie introduces the first Wave demo (boat trip)

0:09:30 – Inline replies in Wave

0:10:10 – Real-time instant messaging in Wave

0:12:05 – Adding a new person into an on-going Wave conversation

0:13:00 – Jens enters the Wave and uses the Playback function to catch up with the conversation

0:14:30 – Private replies in Wave

0:15:20 – Attaching images in Wave

0:16:45 – Photo sharing, group photo album in Wave

0:17:30 – Copying images from an existing Wave into a new one

0:18:30 – Introduction to Wave’s embedding API

0:19:00 – Adding a robot to the Wave (aka Bloggy)

0:20:40 – Greg demonstrates how an embedded Wave works in a blog

0:23:10 – Embedding a Wave into Orkut

0:25:30 – Google Wave on a mobile browser (iPhone, Android)

0:27:00 – Editing image captions in a group photo album

0:27:45 – Second Wave demo (collaborative document authoring)

0:28:25 – Editing content in a Wave (markups, notifications)

0:32:30 – Lars explains a few advanced playback features planned for the future

0:35:40 – Multiple participants editing the Wave in real-time

0:37:10 – Multi-language support (including right-left languages)

0:38:00 – Lars explains how Google Web Toolkit was used to accelerate the development of Wave

0:40:15 – Organizing multiple Waves (folders, saved searches, shared tags, etc), navigating and linking from one Wave to another

0:41:45 – Real-time search in Wave

0:43:20 – Introduction to Wave’s extensions API

0:44:00 – Contextual spell checking using Web-based language model (aka Spelly), bean soup demo

0:45:40 – Auto link detection (aka Linky)

0:46:00 – Lars briefly explains how robot APIs work with Wave

0:47:05 – Google Search extension (aka Searchy)

0:48:45 – Stephanie explains how client-side gadgets can work with Wave

0:50:20 – Yes/No/Maybe gadget example (movie night)

0:51:30 – Multiplayer Sudoku game gadget example

0:52:00 – How Playback works using the chess game gadget example

0:52:25 – Real-time updates with Google Maps gadget example

0:54:00 – Linky detects YouTube URL and provides an option to embed video into the Wave

0:54:50 – Lars explains the possibilities with server-side robots built with extension APIs

0:56:00 – Poll robot (aka Polly the Pollster), example of an extension built exclusively in Wave

0:57:20 – Twitter robot (aka Tweety), example of an extension that integrates Wave with existing communication systems

1:01:10 – Lars explains that Tweety can work with Twitter’s real-time search to continuously update the Wave

1:01:40 – Bug tracker robot (aka Buggy), example of an extension that integrates Wave with existing workflows

1:05:10 – Lars briefly explains the underlying protocols and algorithms of Wave systems (jointly called ‘Federation’)

1:07:00 – Wave working on different systems (Acme Wave, Initech)

1:10:30 – Lars briefly explains the Wave protocol and that a large portion of Wave code will be open sourced

1:11:55 – Language translation robot (aka Rosy) demonstrates on-the-fly language translation. 40 languages are currently supported.

1:15:05 – Lars summarizes Google Wave as a communication object for different types of communication and collaboration

UPDATE 3/10: Google has released an 8 minute video overview of Google Wave.

Did I miss out on anything? If I did, please help by adding a comment below, thanks!

Seth Godin launched his latest project called Brands In Public earlier this week. After some poking around to see what all the fuss was about, two thoughts came to mind.

Firstly, it looked like something that anyone (ok, perhaps a reasonably-skilled Web developer) could easily build – no mind-blowing technology, mostly just publicly-scraped content from sites like Google News, YouTube and Twitter Search. It was, in other words, a really poor looking product by TechCrunch50 standards.

Secondly, Brands In Public appeared to be rather threatening. The idea is interesting enough at first – On the Web, brands cannot control what’s being said about them, so Seth helps out by creating a platform that collects, organizes and publishes public feedback and brand mentions and gets his team to build hundreds of pages; one for each brand. For a fee, companies could access their page and post responses, highlight blog posts and run contests or quizzes. These pages would become the ideal place to organize and respond to positive and negative sentiment in public. Sounds good in theory, but at $4800 a year (0r $400 a month if you prefer) brands with little or no budget would simply be left out of the conversation. If they couldn’t pay, they couldn’t control their page.

Wait a minute, didn’t Seth Godin write a book about permission marketing?

I’m sorry but that sounds a lot like extortion to me, not to mention a PR nightmare for unsuspecting brands who suddenly find themselves on a list that Seth decides to “put in public”. If you’re on that list, you should be worried. Seth has just put a lightning rod on your house and wants to sell you the grounding wire.

UPDATE 28/9: Seth Godin’s team at Squidoo has taken down the pages in response to public outcry (see this, this and this)

So how could he have done it differently? Here are a few ideas:

Give it away for free and go freemium by charging for advanced features like customizable layouts, self-hosting and push alerts. Or if the whole idea was just to make a point, he could charge a ridiculously high fee (how does $10000 a month sound?) and watch the discussions explode all over the Web. After which he could simply say it was an experiment to prove a point, have the pundits singing his praises and still have some traction for his product.

But then of course, I’m not Seth Godin.

Your thoughts?

P.S. I still love his books

Photo credit: Sanglui Zuhtam

Wrote a short article entitled “What is social media, and how does it affect you?” in the May issue of Marketing Magazine (Malaysia).

Click here (PDF, 262kb) to read the full article.

The greatest thing about Twitter is the speed at which it gathers information, a feat which even Google struggles to match (the collective Twitter hive-mind woops Googlebot ass any day ). Since 2008, Twitter has grown to become the world’s most powerful real-time search engine.

What is it about Twitter that makes it so fast? Beyond complex algorithms and raw processing power - I believe the answer is simply, people. The more people propagate word-of-mouth, the faster information travels. Twitter is the World Wide Web at the speed of thought, and its phenomenal growth is the only reason why services like Jaiku and Pownce ceased to survive. The world doesn’t need different types of micro messaging platforms - just one that works well enough.

And with competition out of the way, Twitter can only get faster.

Chart: Twitter’s natural monopoly (Source: The Business Insider)

If Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, they must surely need Twitter, despite what Eric Schmidt says. Without Twitter, search will continue to miss a huge piece of the action – keyword relevant information embedded in tweets (Google’s challenge right now is to filter the noise, sort the useful ones by relevance and integrate them into the SERP in a meaningful format)

I still think it’s a matter of time before Google moves in for Twitter. And if the heavily speculated partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo goes ahead as planned, that time will come sooner.

TechCrunch has just reported the rumor.

I first pondered the possibility in January 2009. Read about my thoughts here.

Link to original post here.

If social media is about people and relationships, and people who matter most to a business are (generally) its customers – shouldn’t we be using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems to manage business relationships in the social media space?

A quick check with the top CRM brands in the business – Oracle, SalesForce.com and Microsoft revealed that none(!) of their solutions provide the ability to create or manage social media programs (Campaign management is limited to search marketing, email marketing and direct mail).

Why is this a problem?

1. Speed and Reach of communication (or rather, a lack thereof) – Customers are interacting in ways that are faster and further reaching than ever before. It’s no longer effective to track client interactions via email or phone logs. The lines are open for us to reach our customers through new and creative ways; we can now engage our audience through Facebook and Ning, or manage customer service through Twitter and Get Satisfaction.
2. Whether you like it or not, customers are sometimes connected with one another – Social media breaks down barriers and it’s no longer practical to manage relationships in silos. We’ve seen how fast information can travel online – if bad news about your company creeps its way into Twitter, expect it to reach your audience faster than you can say “wildfire” (Motrin Mom and Walmart come to mind). Compound that with the virality of social networks and what you get is nothing short of a PR nightmare.
3. With CRM systems, we define relationships – premium customers, hot/cold leads, etc. On the social Web, relationships are defined by people (the strength of those relationships is greatly influenced by 3 factors: Visibility, Engagement and Trust). This disparity may cause us to have a false sense of security with our customers, allowing our better-equipped competitors to creep up on them without us even knowing.

Current CRM systems aren’t designed to handle the new rules of customer engagement. Unless a new and improved model for CRM is developed, I believe it no longer works.

Your thoughts?

A retweet happens when someone tweets your tweet and adds the letters “RT” and a “@yourusername” reference to your original message, indicating that they’re retweeting your message to their followers, as opposed to plain ripping off your stuff. A retweet creates a ripple effect for your message; it’s an excellent way of perpetuating your tweets across multiple people networks.

Like a forwarded email, retweets work like viral pass-alongs except that they’re usually non-spammy (and thus more genuine). A person’s tweets are publicly visible to all his/her followers, so there’s very little room for spam – nobody likes following a spam monger on Twitter. Personally, I like to think of a retweet as the Twittersphere’s way of rewarding people for their contributions. Good Twitter karma, if you may.

Retweets indicate a few things:

1. People are reading what you tweet.
2. The stuff you’re writing isn’t crap (it’s good enough to be shared)
3. People will be checking out your profile (your number of followers might grow as a result of this)
4. People trust you enough to recommend your stuff to their friends (it’s not just your credibility at stake, it’s theirs too)
5. If the RT links to your blog or website, expect a healthy increase in web traffic (you’ll get some good mileage for your tweet)

Side note: If you’re familiar with the concept of linkbaiting, you’ll greatly appreciate the potential of retweets. Twitter users who regularly include links to their own blogs usually enjoy good referrer traffic from their networks. While it’s bad twetiquette to saturate your tweets with self-promotion links, I’d recommend spending a good deal of Twitter time (15-20%) focused on generating exposure for your blog or website contents, especially if you’ve got good stuff to share.

So, think you’ve got what it takes to get RT-ed? Here are some useful tools to get started:

1. Dan Zarella’s list, Retweetist – The top retweeters in the business.
2. Retwit’d – Recently retweeted topics.
3. TweetSuite – WordPress plugin to integrate Twitter with your blog.

More info about retweets:

1. David Armano – The art of the retweet, tapping into Twitter’s viral nature.
2. Techcrunch – It’s not how many followers you have that counts, it’s how many times you get retweeted.
3. Jeremiah Owyang – How bloggers should inspire retweets.
4. Twitip – How to track Twitter clicks and conversions.

Like this post? Retweet it!

Who would’ve imagined 10 years ago:

1. That the world’s largest retail store would have tens of thousands of products, unlimited shelf space and not one single outlet?
2. That people wouldn’t have to pay for music and could bring hours worth of audio with them on the subway or to the gym?
3. That people would trust reviews from complete strangers when planning a vacation or buying a book?
4. That people could vote which news stories they thought deserved most coverage and have it happen in real-time?
5. That anyone could spark a global revolution with 140 characters or less?
6. That we wouldn’t have to rely on a hotline for technical support but could instead depend on a group of regular folks to help solve our problems?
7. That anyone with a camcorder in hand could potentially become the next big video celebrity?
8. That making new friends using the computer wouldn’t be considered geeky?
9. That having an inappropriate picture of  yourself “tagged” on a “facebook” could quickly get you in trouble?
10. That the world’s largest encyclopedia would be written by a small group of unpaid volunteers?

“Web 2.0” or the “social Web” will just be “the Web” someday. We’ll take all the social elements for granted and be really surprised if they aren’t there.