When I first started blogging in 2006 or so, I loved the idea of being able to have conversations with people all over the world, many of whom I didn't even know existed.  It's served me really well in that respect, I've met a ton of people and developed my most important online social network.  I have several relationships in the real world that developed because of blogs.

Then Twitter came along, and was all real-timey and stuff.  It's fun.  It feels like a cocktail party.  I can blurt out things that I think would make funny fortune cookies and there's an audience for that I guess.  But in terms of content it was a real lightweight compared to blogs, the medium is just too constraining.  At its core Twitter is a 140-character message bus, and there are lots of things lacking there for heavy-duty collaboration to happen.

Next came Facebook, which allowed me to find a lot of people but not necessarily the ones I wanted to have technical conversations with.  It's also completely ungeared towards anything longer than a sentence or two, the commenting system resembles a car with just an engine and a frame and a steering wheel.  Also not suited to hard-core collaboration of any kind.

Over time the collaboration model on blogs got better with the introduction of commenting systems like Disqus (although I still don't like the fact that I rely on them 100% to safeguard those comments).  But it never really changed much, we always had blogs and RSS to distribute and comment on meatier content.

But then, this year, came Wave.  And I fell head over heels in love with it.

As I continue to use and experiment with Wave, I keep coming up with interesting little questions and thoughts about where this is all headed.

(By the way, this is also being published as a Wave, so if you're on it you can follow along here.  The waves seem to be much more interactive so I'd highly recommend it.  If you need an invite let me know, I have a few.)

Before you get too far into this, I've also published this post to Google Wave at this link if you'd like to read along there instead.

Using Google Wave heavily over the past several weeks has really gotten my mental gears cranking, pondering all of the changes coming down the pike in the next year or so.

One of the things that I'm really trying to wrap my head around is how a medium like a wave changes the dynamic of the interaction between the publisher of a post and the observers and other participants.  In a wave it's possible for anyone to edit the original text or insert comments directly inline--this is a pretty big departure from the way most messaging platforms work.  For example in this blog post you can't edit what I've already written, and you can't insert your comments directly in the middle, but you can leave comments at the bottom.  In a wave you don't have those restrictions.

I view a major shift in technology, like the one that I see materializing right now with Google Wave (the protocol), as a huge object crashing into a an existing landscape.  There's this massive change right in the middle, a new space that has to be filled, and then all these fissures spidering out from the main event where the rest of the world is affected by that event--new spaces that must be filled with something.

One of the fun things about technology disruptions is trying to figure out what the landscape will look like after the main event.  It's those changes that nimble businesses can take advantage of to pivot into the new spaces that were created.  For example when the Web finally went mainstream it created an entirely new industry, but it then proceeded to change the way every other existing industry operated to some degree, and we're still working through that with things like hosted applications and the SaaS model.

So here's the deal with Wave:  If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you'll miss the boat.  And it's a big boat.  If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.

In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture.  Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself.

I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code.  I haven't done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you're going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.

A couple of glasses of vino on a Sunday night and I got to thinking about what I believe will be the technologies that are going to reshape the world in 2010. After a stagnant year or two in there are some really killer things on the horizon right now.

Every year I enjoy writing a post with my predictions for the next year.  It's a nice way to empty the old thoughts from my brains so there's room for new ones.  Plus I leave a trail of blog posts so I can see how my thoughts change from year to year.

In retrospect I've realized that each year tends to have a theme or two, and that the hardest part about making accurate predictions for a given year is identifying the themes that will drive it.

In 2007 the driving themes were social networking and online entertainment.  In 2008 the themes were distributed and mobile communication, with a dash of cloud computing sprinkled on top.

The theme for 2009 is almost absurdly easy to identify:  the economy.  If you thought 2008 was about the economy, just wait for 2009.  You truly ain't seen nothin' yet.  A deflationary black hole is sucking all of the money out of the economy and we haven't even seen the impact yet.

Every time I hear somebody talk about how the market has bottomed and the economy is starting to improve I mentally picture them in this position:

So if we're talking about the economy and you see me chuckle, you know why.

Hope is a great mindset to have and a fantastic slogan for winning Presidential campaigns apparently, but it is not such a great lens to view reality thru when you're trying to make money.

Every once in a while Google comes along with a great idea that really upsets the apple cart.  Lots of other companies and people have these same ideas, but Google has the ability to rock the boat because of its size and visibility.

I've blogged before that I thought that a Twitter clone aimed at the enterprise world would be a stupendous idea for improving team communication and collaboration.  (I prefer to call this form of communication conversation clouds, because that's what they are in my opinion--a distributed conversation with a broad surface area.)  Today I got to take the concept for a spin, and it didn't disappoint.