A Wave that knows no bounds
Imagine a living, breathing platform that grows with you and every user involved. Google Wave's greatest opportunity may lie in its ability to group chat, email, documents, search, and more into a single hub.
While it may appear otherwise, Google isn't reinventing the wheel with Wave. Rather, it is taking at least five functions that are commonplace on the web and grouping them together in a more comprehensive way.
Google Wave allows users to interact on a single web page and read what others are typing letter by letter. Any regular instant messaging user will be familiar with the boredom and/or anxiety that takes hold when fellow chatters are crafting a response. So-and-so is typing... Still typing. That doesn't give either party much of a window into the mindset of the other, and countless hours are wasted waiting for those replies in traditional chat.
Privacy advocates will be happy to know that the real-time feature can be turned off, but its technological feats can't be overblown, particularly since this all happens inside a browser.
"Google's ability to watch the way humans use technology and design around that is pretty amazing," Broitman says. "What Google does with software, Apple does with hardware."
That said; where is the marketing potential in a Wave?
For now, it centers on new ad placement and the ability for marketers to join more conversations as they happen, or even days and weeks later.
Google Wave not only lets users thread together conversations in real-time, it also allows for responses and notes to be interjected throughout existing text -- regardless of when users jump into the wave.
As Lars Rasmussen explained when demonstrating the product at I/O, users can spend 100 percent of their time reading or writing.
"I love how you can go back in the conversation and insert things for future reference," Broitman says. "I think this is propelling the web to the next level of speed."
Aside from that, there's nothing new for digital marketers on the surface, but don't count Google Wave out as a marketing tool just yet.
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