Monday, March 15, 2010

Flavor of the week

Mid-terms, Comprehensives, Searches, oh my. Some idle speculation on these busy days.

Its funny what a difference scarcity makes even in this bold intangible online frontier. Remember when Google Wave was first rolled out? Everyone was either begging for Invites or rationing them out like it was a bread line? I'm willing to bet half the people asking for them didnt even know what Wave WAS much less why they wanted to use it. All that mattered was being in that shiny circle, to be one of the first to see this newest Google Wundertool.

Now months later please a show of hands, who actually USES Wave? I'm interested what the metrics of use actually are but I know I have a large list of contacts and nobody ever has the little green "Online" ball next to their name.

I am smarmy enough to say that I do actually use it. I run a small online RPG on it with three of my friends playing. It offer a nice venue to run the game at a relaxed pace and all of us ostensibly have fun with it. There is a handy program to roll dice and all the rest is our own prose narrative. Not exactly the Cutting-Edge collaborative environment Google had in mind but we have our fun.

Conversely, who here uses or even liked the idea of Google Buzz? They roll this thing out with little fanfare and opted everybody in and the prevailing response was "What the hell is this?" Perhaps if they'd made it a limited invite only people would have clamored more. Some social network type should capitalize on this, a Social Net like Facebook that you can only get in if you're invited. The online equivalent of the No Girls Allowed Tree Fort.

-G