Do you remember life before fax machines, email and searching online? Do you remember making an appointment to see your doctor to get an opinion without being able to Google professional and everyday opinions on your computer first? It’s like a movie you watched years ago with a plot that’s vaguely familiar but has no relevance to your current life.  That’s how you’ll think of the current web versus the social web that’s expanding daily.

The epicenter of the social web has become Facebook. You already know that over 500 million people use Facebook. Did you also know that people spend over 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month, or that Facebook just surpassed Google to be the #1 site on the internet?

It’s Google and Facebook’s world today and we just surf it. As a Facebook or Google user you win no matter what because they’re building better products, but this world has not been peaceful since Google and Facebook have unofficially declared war on each other over the past few months. Most people have not noticed that it’s even happening, but it will affect all of our online habits in the future. It will also affect the advertising you consume and the availability of your private information.

This war over data will reshape our online ecosystem. Facebook and Google continue to change their minds about how much data they will share with each other. The main reason for this is that you have a Facebook ecosystem of contacts and lifestyle information that rivals your Gmail contact list and your Google search profile. Each ecosystem has some valuable data that the other does not.

At this point Facebook appears to have the upper hand in the war over your attention. Facebook has become the center of the social web with more page views and more time spent on their site than a Google search page will ever commandeer. The release of the Facebook “Like” button on web pages across the globe was a tipping point for socializing the web rather than just using isolated social websites. In their recent effort to have users add Facebook as their web browser home page, Facebook just took another leap forward in having us unconsciously experience Facebooking as the main reason to be online.

Google has been unsuccessful in their attempts to join the social web so far. Google Wave crashed as an experiment in real time messaging and collaborative project development. Google Buzz is still humming along, but has failed to gain widespread adoption, which is the name of this game. Some new products and features seem great when they roll out, but if masses of people do not choose to use them then they wither on the vine. So far, Google is winning this battle in the areas of online search and email, but losing them on the social media front.

The ultimate result of the ensuing war over your online social habits is that you’ll see Facebook and Google both bending over backwards to create more inventive ways to make it easier, faster and more fulfilling for you to communicate with your friends and business colleagues online. Watch for Facebook to add features that let you search the web while staying on Facebook, and watch for Google to add features that connect your social graph and help you more to connect to your friends online.

This article was originally posted in Huffington Post.

This article was originally posted at Oxstein Labs.

In 2009 Google Wave was heralded as a giant evolutionary step in how we would communicate and collaborate online. I admit to being one of the disciples of buzz who ate the hype and imagined a paradigm shift in how online communities would interact.  We were all wrong, but who knows what bricks Google Wave laid down for innovation towards the evolving road of how people use the Internet.

Google has officially closed the door on Google Wave. It was a grand experiment, but even those of us who loved how it socialized email could not find a good use for it.  Everytime I started a wave or joined one it would fizzle within a few hours or a few days.  The functionality was cool, but web developers were the only ones who ever found productive uses for what was hailed as an amazing new productivity tool.

The good news of Google Wave crashing (sorry, I couldn’t help  it) is that they have deepened their interest in social media.  Though this was a failure in the sense that conversations and communities weren’t sustainable, Google has been rumored for awhile to be working on something to go head to head with Facebook.

The direction they are headed in now appears to be social gaming.  Besides buying Slide for $182 million and buying Zynga for $100 million, Google Me is rumored to be Google’s foray into social networking through a gaming platform.  This is smart business since gaming has slipped from the #1 online activity to #2 behind social networking.  By combining the top two ways people like to spend their time online, and therefore the two areas where innovative advertising methods will continue to flourish, Google seems to be playing in a smart pool.

But how far social gaming can go is unknown.  Google may be able to generate niche communities based around specific games, but whether that can make the leap where Google Wave could not is still a question.

Not being a gamer myself, I can’t see being affected by or interested in a ‘social gaming Facebook’ platform. That doesn’t matter much since gaming is a very proven and lucrative market.  They’ll probably do just fine without me as a customer and I’m thankful that Google has the resources to continue pushing innovation further and further.

So if you were Google and wanted to dominate a niche in social media what would you do?

Yes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.  After a few weeks of poking at Google Wave & thinking the concept is cool, but the reality seems to have no juice, I saw Dave Michels post a link to this picture on Twitter and it said everything I had been thinking.

It was gratifying to see I wasn’t alone, though plenty of tweets from others reflected this impression too.  Maybe the hype and promise of email 3.0 was too great a promise for us to not lose a little real perspective on what it would deliver.

Google Wave is still in a beta mode with most of the world still not aware of what it is.  Since you have to be invited to use it, maybe when the kinks are addressed it can be modified and improved before it’s rolled out to the general public.

For now, it’s a great professional collaboration tool with some very interesting features that may or may not be useful enough for us to leave traditional email for personal use. It’s in private beta because it’s a great tool for people collaborating on developing widgets and plug ins.  I have faith that it will evolve into a useful consumer product too.

You can look at my post on Pulp Fiction Explains Google Wave if you haven’t had a chance to play with it.  …and don’t worry, so far you’re only missing out on wondering what the big deal about it is.

I just got my Google Wave invitation yesterday.  I probably won’t have time to play with it to understand it until this weekend.  But after watching this video, it’s easy to see how the social web and social email will be transforming how we share and receive content.

The language is not safe for work, but the demo will show you a new way of using the internet.  Besides, it’s the best scene in Pulp Fiction and hearing Samuel L. Jackson’s soliloquy is always a treat.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo source: Bilal Al-badry’s blog

The main conversations around social media are misguided by debating the usefulness of the tools based on people with limited knowledge misusing them.  Like all human communication, some of what people use the tools for will be nonsense and some will be valuable.

How people individually use social networking tools is the issue, but the focus is usually on whether the tools are worthwhile.  Don’t blame revolutionary tools for how dumb people misuse them.

The quality of the questions you ask and the quality of the conversations you participate in will dramatically affect the quality of your life. That said, the main questions around social media are the wrong ones.  Here are some examples:

“Why should I care about someone posting that they went to the bathroom on Twitter?”

“How can anything meaningful be written in 140 characters?”

“Who has time for that social media stuff?  I”m too busy for that.”

Our old filters of perception and lack of understanding about the bigger picture of what’s happening is misleading a lot of people.  Beyond that, I’ve found that if you aren’t educated on how social media tools and niche communities help your life, you probably won’t ‘get it’ when you experiment with it.

After not ‘getting’ Twitter for almost a year, I asked a friend who was building her business with it to show me the value because I knew I was missing something.  Just having someone tell me about Tweetdeck, hashtags, retweets, direct messages and explain how she used the tool made me ‘get it’ when I started to use it.

Most people over 25 don’t realize how personal branding, social web technology, smart phone technology and niche communities are evolving personal & business communications – which is how you build, manage and operate your personal and business lives.  We are fundamentally changing how we connect, communicate and collaborate.

The impact of this change is like the original impact of radio and TV when they were invented.  The level of usefulness of Twitter & Facebook is the wrong conversation.  That’s the micro conversation and it confuses people who aren’t educated on how these platforms can add value to them personally.

This is like trying to explain the value of personal computing to people in 1980 when they said, “but my typewriter has always worked fine.” (Can those people imagine life without a personal computer or the internet today?) Or explaining what a car could do to people in 1910 who said, “but I have a horse.”  It isn’t easy to understand for non-users until well after the technology moves from early adopters to the mainstream.

A lot of your friends probably don’t use Twitter today. They also probably didn’t use email in 1994, but they do every day now.  …and they might not in 5 or 10 years as it becomes antiquated technology. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking technology will be fused into an entire socialized internet along with many other technologies people do and don’t use yet.

The bigger conversation is the one to be having.  The one that acknowledges that tribes, niche trust communities, technologies like Google Wave and Google Sidewiki, old business systems failing, how Generation Y (which will be the dominant U.S. population as of 2010) operates & much more are the leading indicators that tell us what’s coming next.

What you now do on Facebook you’ll be doing on every website & it will all connect in ways you can’t fathom.  If no one has explained this & you don’t use the power of Twitter & Twitter search in your current relationships you can’t understand this.  In five to ten years everyone will get it because, like people under 25 today, it will be the water we all swim in.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technology has rocked our world repeatedly in profound ways. This will happen many more times and is about to happen again with Google Wave.  It’s going to be a tidal wave!

Imagine email, instant messaging, document sharing and much more integrated into a real time platform.  Or don’t imagine it and just wait a few months because that’s when you’ll be using Google Wave. TechCrunch has a great overview explaining why this is a game-changing product.

With Google Wave being announced it seems like a good time to shine a spotlight on how our world has changed from the release of disruptive technologies.  Some of my favorites have been:

• Smart Phones – before them we actually used a phone for making calls.  Now we use our phones as watches, computers, Rolodexes, calendars, cameras, alarm clocks, jukeboxes, photo albums, yellow page directories, news resources, email clients, video game consoles and a hundred other devices-in-one.
• Pagers – First drug dealers used them with pay phones (remember those?  …pay phones, not drug dealers) and parents used them to get their kids to call home.   With their arrival we began to move into a world where we could be found at any moment aside from being in the shower.
• Mobile Phones - Remember when phones were used connect with a specific location?  Now they are used to connect to a person in any location.  This created a major shift in how we communicate.
• Satellites – Before 1957 there were no satellites.  Fifty-two years later we use them for many purposes across industries as varied as radio, television, telecommunications, navigation, meteorology, land mapping, business & finance, climate & environmental monitoring, space science to name a few.  When is the last time you used a paper map instead of Google Maps on your phone or computer?
• Cable news – I don’t watch it, think it’s moronic and a tabloid distraction, but when it first debuted it was a positive revolution to have 24 hour news.  It killed the habit of tuning into the evening news and broadened possibilities before imploding into itself and beginning to be killed by my favorite disruptive technology so far…
• The Interwebs – Also know as the intertubes or the internet.  Since you’re reading this on the internet you probably know how transformational the internet and personal computers have been.  Pause for a moment and try to remember what your life was like before owning a personal computer, much less a laptop or smart phone.

Some technologies that were revolutionary and became extinct include the betamax, laser discs, vinyl albums, Polaroid pictures, PDAs, 8 Track tapes, cassette tapes and floppy discs.  The thing is, they were all necessary bridges to our modern world of digital convenience.  Much like how email and verbal voice mail may be out of use in 10 years, but they are necessary and interesting to us today.

The key to new innovative disruptive technologies is to look for the opportunities rather than being afraid because the old ways are passing away.  Dinosaur industries like music, TV and newspapers could have done much better than they have in the last 10 years.

They are still blowing it by blaming the world for changing rather than blaming their antiquated hierarchical business models.  The old models had large overheads and made a ton of money for few people while taking advantage of many others.  The new models value human, social, financial and environmental capital equally while collaborating to benefit many through innovation with low costs of entry.

There are tons of great examples like Amazon that have changed our personal and professional lives in deeply profound ways by unleashing innovative products, services and distribution models to an unsuspecting public.  Google Wave is just the next best thing, but lets welcome the changes it will bring to help us to do life in better and more collaborative ways.