How Google Wave will reshape the blogging world forever

Google Wave is a new model of communication and collaboration on the Internet. It is currently being launched and I suspect that it will change the way bloggers write their blogs, and the way that blog readers read the content and interact with the blogger.

What is the Google Wave?

• Real Time!
• Mobile!
• Social!

Facebook does it already. Twitter does it better. Friendfeed connects it all the best. But I suspect that Google Wave will be on another level!

Google Wave is a browser-based app and a place where you can store all your personal content from conversations, emails, Twitter messages, research, pictures, videos and more. I believe it will revolutionize the way people connect, communicate, collaborate and share information with other people online.

Google Wave is an aggregation point. It aims to be the personal hub and combines all our instant messaging, all our emailing, Twittering and other ways we interact and communicate with our existing contacts together. Not only does it combine it all, it also adds a load of functionality on top of it.

All in one, real-time and anywhere you go

Google wants the users to be able to use the Wave across all sites on the Internet. Google Wave will sweep up all your conversations online into a cloud. All in one and all in your browser, all real-time and all anywhere you go!

Some of the features that were presented at the introduction of Google Wave are:

• Respond to a particular sentence within an email, not just to the email as a whole
• Simply start typing and your friend will see words as you enter them and vice versa
• “Playback” feature – rewind to see what has happened in the past and watch how it progressed through the changes
• Live group collaboration – edit things Wiki-style
• Bloggy Embeddability - Embed waves on any blog or website
• Twave Twitter Client – Completely integrated with Twitter. Get tweets, write tweets, scan Twitter for your keywords
• Drag and drop files to share
• Advanced spell checker that not only looks through a dictionary for spelling, but also corrects the grammar by looking at the context of the sentence

How could the Wave affect the blogging world?

• Your content will be exported into a wave via your RSS feed

Imagine that your article gets exported into a Google Wave in real-time, as soon as you have published it. People then read it via Google Wave only. This is done today with RSS feed and RSS readers. But the Wave will allow your readers to add their tips, their experiences and other information directly into your post.

• Your content will become a public domain

Looking on this from a larger perspective, this would mean that your content will be about ideas. Share your content in hope of inspiring the readers. The content will become the public domain and the readers will take your post to another level and give it a new life by editing and adding to it.

• Readers to interact on a Wave and not on your post

The above will result in people also interacting with your content and with each other by commenting and editing the wave instead of going directly to your  blog. Something similar is already happening on FriendFeed but FriendFeed is very small at the moment. Google Wave will have many users and that will influence your blog.

• Advertising to be integrated into the content

When your blog and your content becomes decentralized it will be more about ideas and thoughts. It will be up to the readers to decide how and where to read your content and in what format. That means that less people will read your content directly via your blog. And this means less page views and less space for banner ads. There will be more space for sponsored content to be integrated into the post like affiliate programs, your own product or sponsored posts.

What should WordPress do to get synergy with the Wave?

• Integration with the Wave

It is good to know that WordPress is on it already. Recently they have released the P2 live group blogging theme and there will definitely be a lot of stuff coming out for Google Wave from WordPress and other WordPress plugin developers. Plugins that integrate your blog content into Google Waves and plugins that integrate Google Wave content into your blog post.

• Live blogging / commenting must be enabled

Make live blogging / live commenting possible. Imagine that as soon as I start writing a blog post it gets visible on the blog. Imagine readers being able to follow a post getting written letter by letter in real-time. Imagine readers adding their own input and ideas into the post live while the blogger is writing it.

What can bloggers do to be prepared for the wave?

• Build a community around your blog

Your blogging brand will be even more important than before. You need to stand for something, you need to have something unique and you need to be personal. This way you will create a community around your blog content. This way you will build a fan base. And your fan base will stick with you no matter where they read your content.

• Connect with your audience via Google Apps

All Google apps are well integrated with each other. When you write an email to someone with a GMail account, that person is automatically added to your GTalk instant messenger account. Same with for example the friends you have on your YouTube channel.

Now imagine that you can be one step ahead of many bloggers as soon as the Google Wave is launched. You can do that by connecting with your audience via Google tools already today. Then at the launch of Google Wave you will have many connections on Google and your blog will be ready and thriving, riding the wave while your competitors will have to start from scratch.

• Add Google Friend Connect

For this purpose I have now added Google Friend Connect community to my blog sidebar. I will experiment with this in the upcoming weeks to find the best solution / exposure for it. Please join it and connect with me and with other bloggers that are reading my blog.

I have also customized my HowToMakeMyBlog YouTube channel and I plan to add my videos there in the future.

Google Wave Developer Preview

If you want more info about the Google Wave, see the developer preview video below:

Watch out – your readers will soon be riding the wave, and if you want to compete you would have to ride it too!

Am I onto something or?

What do you think? Am I onto something here or is Google Wave not something you expect to influence the blogging world too much?

Image by Sergio Tudela.