- Fluid'Advance – by Brieuc Saffré : Web, Advertising, Photo… by Brieuc

Several weeks ago, Google introduced a fantastic new tool: Google Wave. This is for me the next big thing on the web. After the blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave will represent something much bigger than all these platforms (yes they’ll be integrated). As the Google developpers say in the keynote, the email was created 40 years ago (yes surprising), many innovations came since that time especially since Internet became easier to access and popular.

I do believe that Google created a new era for communication (in its largest meaning) and collaborative work. Do not hesitate to spend one hour to watch this video (that’s the reason why I did not talk about Wave before!).

Many factors tell me that Wave will be a fantastic tool that will definitely change our ways of exchanging, sharing and working…

- Open-Source code, that means unlimited innovations and adaptations.
- Real-time, everything that is happening on the wave is shared in the same time everywhere.
- No more mails, instant messaging, twitt’, status updates… a wave!
- Collaborative work seems so easy, forget Lotus, Outlook… especially with this playback option that plays all the actions of the wave in the chronological order.
- All the Google service integrations (Search, Maps, YouTube…) and all the ones you can imagine it’s open-source!
- It’s mobile as well, don’t worry about Android or the iPhone, it will work.
- The embed options, you will be able to embed or start a wave from a blog with any person you want.
- The applications (the poll was a nice exemple in the video or the event app.).

So, once again, I think Wave will represent something really crazy. The idea seems really simple and corresponds perfectly to what we need now to work and communicate. Like for Twitter (even if I do hope that will be quicker for Wave), I think the hardest part will be the people and organization adaptation to this new way of collaboration.

I am just afraid of thing… the SPAM wave .

Several weeks ago, Facebook made some changes on its way of working. This time, I must notice that change management was better dealt than with the terms of use. However, once again, the users do not like the changes. After having tried to buy Twitter, (several offers around $ 500M in cash or Facebook participation were refused), the Facebook strategy changed. The new objective was « to kill Twitter ». They created for example Facebook connect at the end of 2008, the first results seem interesting (even if I still don’t like it, more about this here). The Facebook status is no more asking you « What are you doing? » but What’s on your mind? » and there’s no more difference between your status and your wall. Last month, Facebook made the most serious change for me, they opened the users status. Yes, exactly like on Twitter. And to finish, the Facebook profile can be now opened to « Everyone ». You can find a quick sum up about this strategy on AllFacebook.

A last strange fact, Mark Zuckergerg, the famous CEO of Facebook, created a Twitter account. You must think that is weird. As I read once again on AllFacebook, « imagine if Mark Zuckerberg decided to set up a MySpace page to start promoting himself in order to reach a different audience, Do you think he would do that? I doubt it.« .

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For several weeks, I saw that many blogs added different new tools to try to identify their communities. On Fluid’Advance, like on many blogs, you can find MyBlogLog, the Yahoo Tool. It’s interesting and many widgets are proposed but, for example, concerning France, most part of the users are Web addicts. I think that is almost the same here in Australia, most of the people don’t have any MyBlogLog account. Of course, I think that the most interesting for the blogger is to know every member, especialy the regular ones. That’s the main MyBlogLog default for me, if you compare the number of Facebook users… you will realise that you can not really know your community.

Maybe you saw the new tools used for example on OpenPolitik or on Blog de nuit. First, you can see the Google Connect (launched at the end of 2008), both added this one recently so we can not really make any conclusion except maybe that there is not so many people who created their Google account for the moment. On OpenPolitik, Sam Granleese just installed the Facebook Connect (launched just before Google Connect). I already saw this one several months ago for a Red Bull website. I think it’s a great idea. Maybe it will take time to build the Facebook community on the blog. Indeed, each visitor must connect on the blog and you will have interactions between Facebook and the comment part of the blog, so the debate is shared by much more people. You have also technic and useful details for comments, the visitor logged only once (if you want more details, go on the Sam’s post where he explains his choice).

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For a long time, I have really hesitated between these 2 main solutions for sharing my pictures proposed by Yahoo (Flickr) and Google (Picasa). Quickly, for me, the Yahoo’s solution is the best for different reasons even if Picasa offers some interesting advantages but the best for you depends on why you want to upload your pictures (quality portfolio, share pictures, picture storage…).

For example, concerning the picture quality, there is no doubt, Flickr respects the more your pictures, even if you lose some saturation, the results is clearly better than Picasa’s one. Look at these examples, of course, the uploaded picture is exactly the same.

The picture by Flickr

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