Google Wave is ‘Email Refreshed.’ The entire purpose of Email when it came into existence was to be a more effective medium than ’snail’ mail. As a result, Email wasn’t built to be able to include videos within the message or to have an embedded Monopoly board that would allow you to play the game with your friends via Email. No one back then thought that you would be able to do such things over the Internet and consequently the way Email is right now, such features can not be added. So Google has built a whole new tool called Wave that allows rich communication and collaboration and that could potentially phase out Email.

Wave also tackles a lot of small problems that currently exist with E-mail and Instant Messaging. For example, when there is a long exchange of mails amongst a large group and someone important gets included at a later stage – then he or she may find the context missing. Also, some may reply to an older email in which case the new people on the list may get left out again. With Google Wave that would not happen. It introduces a playback button which takes you through the entire exchange of messages sequentially like in a video.

Apart from several such improvements, Google Wave also allows you to collaborate with friends and colleagues. So it gives you the ability to collaborate on a presentation or solve a sudoku puzzle along with a friend or play chess against someone without needing any attachments.

While all of this makes it sound like a revolutionary concept, the truth is that the smaller improvements come at the expense of a lot of complexity and requires a user to learn a whole new way to communicate. Despite my savviness with technology, I found the tool extremely painful to understand and use. Also, while the collaboration ability is actually path-breaking – one may want to use it either to work on documents with colleagues or to play games with friends. And for that we already have document collaboration tools like Google Docs and if one wants to play games with friends you would rather go to Orkut or Facebook. The whole point is, why would anyone want to collaborate on a document or play a game inside an email when there are better ways of doing it on other applications such as social networks?

Verdict: Google Wave will get an extended run because it’s from the Google stable but in its current avatar it won’t see too much success. Google is probably desperate to win an audience that is fast moving towards Facebook for all its communication needs. But then Wave is definitely not the answer.

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This review was written for the first edition (November 2009) of the newly launched Times Group magazine called Top of Mind that is focused on celebrating marketing excellence. (Scanned copy)

Answer: Buy out Blurb and integrate it. Or work with Blurb to create plugins and apps.

Why?

Blurb puts a professional press and global distribution in the hands of every blogger, marketer, traveler, chef, photographer, consultant, family historian, online community – in fact, everyone.

So if Facebook could integrate Blurb, they could allow you to print different kinds of books of your life – a yearbook of what you’ve been upto, your lifestream, your photos, your conversation threads with a set of friends or absolutely anything. Wouldn’t it be great to capture all of this and see your life in print (unless you’ve !@#$ed up your life and would see none of it)

Now imagine if Twitter could integrate a Blurb-like system as well. I’d love to capture the Twitter feeds of @davewiner, @garyvee, @guykawasaki, @loic, @scobleizer, @ssethi, @steverubel, @timoreilly and print these as monthly magazines. Or for that matter, I could print the journey of a band like @swarathma.

If Typepad/WordPress would integrate Blurb, then I’d like to print all of Seth Godin’s posts in to a book.

I guess you get my point. This could be done by Flickr, Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo or a Wikipedia.

You could argue that all of this can be done even now. Users could pull out stuff and print it using Blurb. That’s true. But the Internet has made us lazy. You could put Skins on GMail a long while ago by tweaking your browser but widespread adoption happened only when themes became part of the GMail offering. You need to put a solution out there for the user to know what they can do with it. My gut tells me that if everyone could print portions the Internet, they would. Especially, when you let them be the author and/or editor.

Another argument against such a solution would be that a lot of the content online is in the form of links, videos, MP3s, and it is difficult to capture all of it in a book. Well, just leave it out. Every solution need not be perfect and the Internet has taught us this. Even otherwise, the books could be supplemented with a DVD that grabs all of this content.

Or even better, allow people to create these books so that they could be loaded on to the Kindle and they need not be printed. (since we could all do with more trees)

(I have been thinking about this since I followed DEMO 2005. I was following the conference because I was excited about Munjal Shah’s Riya. However, what really got my attention then was Blurb. While I do not think Blurb is the only option, the idea is to allow users to publish what they wish.)

The Wikipedia is impossible, but here it is. It is one of those things impossible in theory, but possible in practice. Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else that is impossible in theory might work in practice… We have to get good at believing in the Impossible.
- Kevin Kelly

• Infibeam – Well on it’s way to being India’s Amazon.
• Cleartrip – Definitely the best Indian travel site.
• Burrp – Lifestyle/Locals portal.
• Phulki – Music search engine

I’d appreciate your opinions too.

• They don’t really end up getting you multiple loan/insurance offers as they promise. Most of them sell the leads to banks on an exclusivity basis and erase the very purpose of their existence.
• They don’t focus on organic traffic and rely heavily on getting traffic through Google Adwords and ad networks. And thus are functioning as arbitrage businesses. With the kind of volumes online, the arbitrage model can not be justified.
• The consumer side of the product is just a bunch of forms. So absolutely anyone and everyone tries to get into this business relying on Google Adwords to get their leads. Try running a search for Personal+Loan+Mumbai and see the number of advertisers vying for presence. I saw 17 of them. This means that the already thin volumes get further distributed. What it also means is that the bidding for keywords is high, hiking up the cost per acquisition.
• The quality of leads is pathetic. Most people who fill forms on these sites are those who have already tried and failed to get one through other channels.

Internet in India may have reached millions of households (at least in large cities) but are all members of the household using the Internet? For example, I rarely see parents going beyond e-mail/IM/online banking/trading. And I ask why? Why doesn’t the Internet have the same impact on my mother as do TV/newspapers/magazines? I think the answer lies in the fact that there is very little valuable content online for her. For example – my mom would surely like to see online versions of magazines that feature designer clothes. I couldn’t find any when I searched for them. She’d definitely catch up on episodes online if she missed out on them on TV. Also, she’d rather consume content in Gujarati/Hindi than in English. Unfortunately, none of these content needs are currently met online. Till that happens, I don’t even see much coming out of the Internet industry trying to woo users in semi-urban India. On a positive note, this means there is a huge opportunity which can be tapped if you are in the online content business in India. I smell one everyday. And I’d like to jump into it right away.

Modification of my original post at Click & Brick.