Google Wave – The Future Of Digital Communication

There was a time when when we all thanked the Internet for e-mail. It was the best thing that ever happened to us as it made life a lot  more easy for all of us to keep in touch and communicate with everyone. Then came the web 2.0 era, with social networks, blogs, discussion forums,  where communication took a different meaning across various platforms.

With Google Wave launching this year, digital communication will evolve to greater heights. This new baby that Google intends to launch is a realtime communication platform that combines email, IM, Social Networks, Wiki etc all under one neat platform. The layout might look something like below.

Google Wave The Future Of Digital Communication

This product has created so much buzz and is one of the most talked about and I personaly can’t wait for it to launch

To learn more about Google Wave watch this video

You can also read the Google Wave Guide.

Pope Benedict Decides To Go Digital

There was great appreciation for the Obama campaign and the way he used social media to drive awareness and affinity with his audience. His fan page today on Facebook has over 6 and a half million followers. Having seen this success story, Pope Benedict has also decided to use the social media platform to connect with the Catholic youth around the world.

The Pope launched the Youtube channel last year and now he is getting on to Facebook, with the launch of his own application “Pope2You”. The idea is to go beyond just a facebook application as there is a website too called pope2you.net which is trying to connect the Youtube channel, facebook app & the iPhone app. I’m sure it won’t be long before we see the Pope on Twitter.

The Vatican describes this as follows:

“Pope2You for Facebook lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world. So you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”. The postcards can be sent to your “friends” on Facebook and the application can be shared with anyone.”

Pope Benedict's Page On Facebook

While it might be in the best interest of the Vatican to use Internet as a broadcast medium alone, I am not sure if this is going to be a great success. A large part of any success on the interactive medium lies on interactivity the medium provides. To genuinely build that connect people need to  communicate, express their opinions & be heard.

Anyway, it would be interesting to see how this goes, but again a short interesting story on the impact of social media on the world of communications.

Download Free Coldplay Album

I love music. As a kid I used to save every bit of my pocket money to buy cassettes. Now with online music & the Internet I really don’t quite remember the last time i bought a CD from the store. However, the biggest threat the music industry is facing is obviously piracy. The music industry is loosing close to $600 to $ 650 billion every year.  I am not sure if much can be done about that but music going digital is probably one of the best solutions to the problem. Online music refers to music that has been digitized and can be downloaded. Apple has tried to use this through iTunes to good effect. 

Coldplay has actually decided to move their distribution online. One of the most popular. This band from UK has actually released a new album online leftrightleftrightleftThis is a collection of some of their live performances. Way to go Coldplay a nice way to build a really strong fan base  

 

Leftrightleftrightleft Coldplay

With News Aggregators Do We Need A Newspaper?

Well to be honest, I don’t quite remember the last time I sat and read the newspaper seriously. Frankly with news aggregators you can pretty much get what you want the way you want it. The most basic and easy to use of them all is  iGoogle.  Yahoo Pipes is an excellent product to monitor news, blogs features etc… though I am not fascinated by the interface and useability of the tool. I have actually used pipes to filter news and publish it through RSS feeds. But it’s not very consistent and there’s always some issue or the other.

The other interesting aggregator which seems to be the mother of it all is Popurls. If you have not signed up for this yet you should. It manages to pick the latest on the web through news, bookmarks, images, videos etc… It’s really a good resource to gather the information you want and share it.

Popurl.com The news aggregator

Apart from this Popurl also has a network where you can explore a lot of interesting stuff like buzz monitoring through popurl search, the top viewed urls through popurl.tv and take it to your mobile, iPhone and BlackBerry through Popurl.mobi. Check it out and let me know if we really need newspapers anymore