
google wave for sure, was a hyped up thing like google mail. I’m sure noone would really disagree that gmail changed the way we perceive the space in email, and that the hype was worth it. I remember, one of the coolest email providers before gmail, was hotmail that gave 2 mb space in my free account. then yahoo gave 100mb or so. then you register yahoo account as a US resident, then you fuckin get 250 mb space for which, you should pay otherwise. and not many knew it n some even struggled with their 2mb mail accounts out of first love or something like that :p. your email, your messenger, all were hundred different things. you might end up using each one of them with so much care and sophistication that you missed out on the existence of the other ones. I knew people who used yahoo mail and not messenger, and some who used only messenger. and using msn was almost unthinkable, in the place i lived.
For my picture to appear on the computer screen was such a big thing, while i was in ninth standard. even 10th or eleventh. There were several inhibitions in the ways we thought about the internet. Our concepts and ideas were fixed. Our imaginations, fixed by the phones. or tvs or video games. The video conferences were always seen in these hi-fi sci-fi movies. But these inhibitions had their roots in what was perhaps real then: in the dial-ups, in the closet-emails, and in the way computers were things that a lay-person cant really handle. I remember, in my 4th standard in Anantapur, there was this computer exhibition. My father or someone took me there and i was thrilled by the idea of “suitcase computer”, which i later became used to, and it still excites me: laptop.
The awe and the idealization of the computers was mostly in the air, in the way we thought and in the way we acted. Now its on blogs, on Facebook communities and on tweets (we, as we know cant really blanket the majority Indians). The democratization of internet really starts(as far as i remember) probably when each of the early gmail accounts got some 50 invites. And Gmail invites were no more seen with that awe. After gmail gave its free 1gb space, then the other companies started to quickly move pawns, though we ve already lost interest in them. Who wouldn’t like originality? or innovation that pushes our time-lines forward?
Google took one more brilliant step (i don’t remember exactly when it did) by becoming more open-sourced(its now obvious from the chrome browser which is opensource and the google wave that is opened up to the developers across the borders). The spirit of GPL and opensource drove several other projects that were innovative and passionate, and perhaps, were tactically incorporated to certain extent into google. The need for monopoly of a big company like google, was actualized through the opensource and its “genuine” opensource behavior for its own ends.Well, google’s wave to monopolize the web seems to be very obvious.
Google wave surprised me day before yesterday, in my mailbox with a google wave invite . And then I ve been trying it since then. The one and half hour video of google wave in the google I/O (thats the looong video on http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html), was very promising, at least conceptually. It almost said : ‘Email systems of the past were brilliant, but Google wave shall takeover, and we need some help.’
I will write more when moods come again when they come