I’m going to make a bold statement. Every main form of social media communication we’ll be using for the next half decade at least is already popular. We won’t see any new startups breaking out in the same way. That phase is over. Gmail leads by a mile in webmail. Facebook is the best way to stalk your friends and Twitter is the way to go if you want to make yourself look like a wag. What’s the way forward now? Grouping all these forms of communication together.
It started with Twitter clients. Twitter is a great form of communication, hampered by a clunky web interface. Smart devs took advantage of the API and trotted out clients that update in realtime, resized to slap on the side of your screen or altered for mobile. Some of them (Tweetie, say) might even be making a substantial profit, unlike Twitter itself.
Then, Facebook got a little jealous and rolled out a new Facebook publisher bar to publish comments, links and media, just like Twitter. Suddenly, it made sense to start having a Twitter client that brought both sites together: Twhirl’s successor Seesmic Desktop does just that.
Now though, we might have just seen the apex of that progression: Google Wave. Unveiled at Google’s I/O conference, it’s not web 2.0, it’s not web 3.0, it’s just everything rolled into one system. You can message people, share content drag and drop stylee, have messages shown being tapped out in realtime, and conversations embedded in websites. If that sounds a bit confusing, check out the demo video below. It’s long, but well worth a watch, and can explain it far better than words (Google Wave isn’t just about words after all).
Here’s the thing: when it launches (next year), Google Wave isn’t going to replace any of these services I mentioned above. It’s just going to bring them all together, and in your browser to boot. There’s already a Twitter gadget for it, Twave, and the API is out there right now to make much more. It’s not hard to imagine everything from Digg to BBC iPlayer from getting on board with it too.
That’s where the next goal lies: grouping all your communication and social media together to make it accessible in one place. Maybe Google Wave won’t be the holy grail of it. But that’s where we’re going.