Once upon a time there was a little wave that came to shore. It splashed and splashed and people talked about how splashy it was. It really tried and was able to get some people wet, and people increasingly wondered, will this wave actually be the next big hit online?
And then, gray clouds began to form, and people lazily wondered, will this little rain make the waves bigger or smaller? Indeed, a little raindrop began to fall and before hitting the ground, it noticed that waves were coming and coming.
Sorry about this little fantasy. The point is very simple: Google Wave vs. Mozilla Raindrop. Most people talk about the Wave as it is coming from Google and no one can ignore anything coming from G. A lot has been said, will Wave revolutionize the web, change the way we interact or simply flop as a big loss of privacy and a bad iteration for email? But hardly do we hear about Raindrop, which is a project of the Mozilla foundation that also aims at revolutionizing the email as we know it.
Both projects are different. Wave aims to help in group collaboration, privately and publicly, by combining email, blogging, and instant messaging. Raindrop is interested in combining social media with traditional email to scrape over conversations, categorize them and connect them.
Even though this are somehow different projects, both aim to regulate an overflow of information that is happening online to most advanced users. These two projects signal the future of the web and in every instance of it, the social media has had a major effect and will be an integral part.
One other detail strikes me here, the web has been moving from the incredibly flashy and colorful to the simple and streamlined. Sure, images and video are an integral part of the web, but the elements of design are becoming more straight forward and clean, more text centered.
In a future, where the internet in computers and super cellphones combine, one can only get a very small glimpse of what that future holds.