I really like MG Siegler’s post on TechCrunch about Google Wave and the dawn of aggressive (active)-passive communication. This seems to be what Siegler means by this:
Google Wave is attempting to be a passive-agressive form of communication. You can actively (aggressively) engage in threads in real-time, or you can sit back and let messages come to you at your leisure (passively).
Siegler points out this is not primarily a Google thing. It is about Wave being a platform and a new communications standard:
Wave, the Google web-based client, will only ever appeal to a certain number of users. Does anyone really think that Twitter would be where it is today if they only had twitter.com? No. Wave desktop apps, and mobile apps, internal company Waves, and public Waves; it’s the platform, not the product, that’s interesting. Or, more to the point, it’s the key communication idea behind it.
Facebook combines email, status updates, instant messaging, a stream, various media forms, but in Siegler’s opinion this is a rather messy combination.
I like this way of seeing through the current company structures and pointing to what is radically new. It’s not Twitter, but a certain communication practice, it’s not Google in this case, but another communication practice – the Wave, and one could say it’s not Second Life, it’s yet another communication practice.
I’m just wondering, but how does a virtual world such as Second Life or Metaplace compare to this Wave practice? Are these worlds fluid combinations of all these communication formats, allowing for passive-aggressive communication? Or are these world more like a possible component in a larger Wave?
I’ve no idea, but all input is more than welcome…
Roland Legrand