Got my Google Wave invite!

W000t! After many months of waiting, I finally got a Google Wave invite. I signed up to request an invite the first 24 hours they were available ... unlike some of Google's other recent invite offerings, like GAE, I apparently ran out of luck, and had to sit and wait for an invite like the other 99,999 people who got them from Google in the past day.

For my friends and readers: I have 5 "invite nominations" left to give out. Ping me via email or Twitter if you'd like an invite.

Some people think Wave will change our communication landscape ... frankly, though impressive, what I've seen so far makes me think it's just another great tool in the toolbox of real-time web awesomeness. Remains to be seen if Wave becomes the most conversation-centric of these offerings, or if conversation-centricity is even relevant in the long run.

UPDATE: Less than 45 minutes later, I am now out of invite nominations. I will post a new post if/when I am granted more opportunities to pass these out.

I declare Web 3.0

I can do that because Bernanke says the recession is over and I have a blog, right? Even if I don't have an Irish last name, a large publishing and media empire, and huge ego? Wait, check that, got the ego.

Of course I'm sure you ask: what IS Web 3.0?

It's the SEMANTIC WEB like all the search gurus and jargon bandwagoneers have been blogging and blagging on about for years now, right?

Sorry people, I have to disagree. Web 3.0 is going to be all about "real-time web."

Let's look at the space:

Facebook gets it! They bought FriendFeed, which is real-time-centric, has real-time-search and created SUP - Simple Update Protocol. SUP is a mechanism of faster RSS & ATOM conveyance; per Wikipedia, some implementors include YouTube, Disqus, Brightkite, Identi.ca, Backtype and 12seconds.tv. And on a separate but related note, Facebook recently launched Facebook Lite.

Twitter gets it - they've been real-time since the beginning! And they have started to analyze conversations in real-time pretty hardcore in the past year or so, beginning with their purchase of Summize. Their real-time offering is their Streaming API. Twitter's busy enough dealing with availability and scaling issues, and gaffed over OAuth too often, to offer something that I would expect to propagate across the industry as a standard protocol however.

People at Google get it, at least 20% of the time: check out PubSubHubBub, (PSHB) a real-time RSS and ATOM mechanism that runs on Google App Engine (GAE). Some big name implementors include FriendFeed, Live Journal and Six Apart. As well as Google itself of course.

Dave Whiner Winer gets it: he developed rssCloud years ago. Unfortunately it never experienced wide implementation. It's a solid offering, but with the growing popularity of GAE and activity levels around PSHB, I think Dave's protocol is going to end up left out in the cold by a lot of developers and architects. That said, WordPress did implement rssCloud recently. I haven't noticed any other big names do so yet, but I can't say I've been particularly focused on the topic.

Of course real-time tends to greatly increase the volume of information (if not the quality of the signal). Perhaps semantic will play a large role in helping us sift through all the feeds from our various new real-time toys, but Web 3.0's foundation is going to be real-time, period. Rich, robust semantic will perhaps be icing on the cake of real-time.