I gained access to the Google Wave beta earlier today, and logged in with quite some excitement. If you’ve not heard about Google Wave yet, you have either been living under a stone, or you have a life - you know, a real life, like normal people. I burst through the doors, and while not expecting anything in particular, I didn’t quite expect what I saw.
Tumbleweed blew by. I’m not joking.
Google Wave is designed to aid collaboration - and my admittedly (purposely) minimal past experience of “collaborating” had a key feature - other people. I felt like the kid who was told to check out the swimming pool on the roof, and was then shut on the fire escape.
Perhaps I’m a victim of my own enthusiasm for the proliferation of social tools sweeping the internet at the moment. Those of us with a curious bent will no doubt have explored Tumblr, Friendfeed, Identica, and Twitter. The rest of the connected world is only just getting it’s head around Facebook.
Facebook has a bell shaped experience curve. In the first few days of membership, people request the world and it’s dog as friends. They then discover the “applications” and waste 23 hours of each day completing movie quizes, throwing cakes at each other, or attempting to talk like a pirate. Their social graph eventually drops off when they discover Farmville, and their own family don’t see them again.
I sometimes wonder what the current “new generation” on the internet would have made of IRC and Usenet. IRC, or “Internet Relay Chat” still exists of course - providing a wonderful back channel to the advertising laden idiocracy that pervades the world wide web.
There seems to be a danger inherent in all forms of “social media” - that you may end up spending so much time cultivating, feeding and managing the various relationships you build that your time in the virtual world eventually exceeds the time you spend in the “real world”.
A news report on the television caught my attention while making dinner last night - asking if people could survive without their mobile phones. They were met with horror struck gasps and laughter at the clearly preposterous idea. I noticed they only asked women.
Is it so preposterous though?
Has social media improved or damaged our lives?