Whit Andrews

It was back in something like 1999 that I saw Bill Nguyen for the last time (he’s not dead, but running Lala — I just ain’t seen him in a while). Bill was running Onebox.com at the time, which was a different company from the current Onebox.com, about which I know nothing. What I had learned from watching Bill run companies was that he was usually thinking about the business opportunity that massive success at his current service would make possible. I use the same logic, now, on Google, and two paragraphs from here I’m going to tell you what I think about why they’re building Wave.

I walked into his office that afternoon in 1999 late to an interview (I was interviewing him as a reporter). Onebox was a means of providing faxes, voicemail and email to a single service that would look basically like a Webmail client — and this was way before UCC. It was scaling out very fast (and was bought shortly after). I walked in and said, “Bill, I figured you out while I was driving. You don’t care $%^& about voice mail or faxes or email. All you care about is the box. You’re gonna sell people the right to deliver me songs and pictures and movies to my onebox!” And he laughed like I was Richard Pryor at his funniest.

Bill never did actually answer me, though, and Onebox disappeared into what was then Phone.com and Bill got filthy rich (which I think is nice, because I liked Bill a lot) and I never found out.

Wave is just like Onebox. What Google is trying to build is something that will allow me to sweep money-making objects into my communication stream. They are building new inventory, in other words — a new delivery model that will allow for advertising separate from their core search model.

Search ads are the business of delivering an ad for something at the instant that people confess to the great machine of Google (or Yahoo or Lycos or whatever) that they need something. Ads in communication allow for us to create demand in our friends and relatives. (Have you fanned anything on Facebook? Sure you have, and if you haven’t, I bet you will eventually.) I post the record of the concert tickets I buy to my Facebook profile, and I’ll cheerfully let them ride my wave as well, especially as Google is promising standards so that I don’t have to do it on a Google server but can use anybody’s, persisting and I hope even transporting my Wave from place to place.

Surely somebody should make money from my ability to do that, and why wouldn’t that somebody be Google?

To recap:

1. Google knows that amount of need in the world is finite, and not everyone will Google everything they need. Search ad inventory is, therefore, limited. Google has plenty of room to grow in it, but it will eventually run out of new inventory.

2. Google therefore needs new inventory, and radio and newspapers have not panned out. Video is interesting, but it’s more entertainment-oriented and less focused on what people need right now. (It’s not all like that, mind you.)

3. Wave represents that new inventory. Google will develop a means of taking a tiny fraction off commercial inclusions in Wave, probably through value-added services and possibly contextual advertising.

What does that mean? It means that Wave will be driven by money-making concerns, which is to the good. It means that as long as the standards are helpful to Google in developing even more inventory, they’ll follow them. It means that ads will become communication-friendly. It means that the false intimacy of Minority Report — so often used by personalization advocates and naysayers — will be less important than chummy P2P-driven advertising bits.

I wish I could say I will steer clear of Wave out of righteous concerns, but I can’t. I adore Facebook, which I see in many ways as seeking to fill the needs that Wave will also address. (That’s an oversimplification most suiited for the end of a post.) I remember when AOL tried to accomplish what the Web ultimately made work even better. There was a time when I resisted using Facebook because it was just too much the sort of thing Everybody Did. But, truly, if my friends and co-workers adopt Wave, I know I will too. I look forward to finding out how we’ll shape Wave to work for us.