Pioneering the interwebs does not equate to success #wavegoodbye

I recently watched a documentary called We Live in Public, about an internet entrepreneur called Josh Harris who physically predicted future online trends. In the 90s he was often compared to Andy Warhol, but Josh knew people didn’t want 15 minutes of fame, they wanted to be famous all the time. In the days of dial-up he invented social media by creating an underground “hotel” where residents interacted through 24/7 surveillance. When he got sick of that project he and his girlfriend moved into an apartment with cameras everywhere and crowd sourced their lives.

Yes that’s right he did that way before rubix cube guy had the idea.

The amazing thing is no one has heard of Josh Harris. Even the CEO of MySpace had no clue who he was, and yet he pioneered web 2.0. Go watch the movie.

I feel Wave has fallen to a similar fate, too advanced and bold for it’s time. Sure it probably would have taken off it had integration with Gmail, but that’s not really the point. People are saying they predicted it would fail because of various faults with the interface, but the interface did no justice to it’s working capabilities. The back end of Wave was far beyond anything else currently available and I sure hope in 10 years the whole internet functions the way it does.

Will be interesting to see what the talented team behind it end up doing. Josh Harris has been long forgotten and is currently living in Ethiopia, it would be sad to see the Google Wave team fall into the same obscurity. (Hopefully Greg leaves Google to become the next Willy Wonka.)

To all you haters, I hope in a few years you have the hindsight to see Wave pioneered Web 3.0.