Tumblroth

Google introduced its upcoming Wave technology/platform today. Very interesting with all kinds of implications — many of which O’Reilly addresses well on his blog. One quote really jumped out at me:

In the wave shown below, participants are asked whether they can make it to a party. Responses appear immediately in the wave. That’s the way these things ought to work! No jumping to a website to see the results of an Evite or a poll.

It strikes me that this kind of Web surfing could have a real impact on the way we serve advertising today — even more so than what we’ve seen from the spread of dynamic content updating technologies like Ajax. The reliance on page views has to suffer when people aren’t leaving pages — when they’re constantly being updated in real time. Perhaps that would be a good thing: more focus on how long people interact with sites rather than how much of the site they churn through.

I can see online ads moving from resembling billboard to mimicing the kind of advertising typically found at baseball games behind the catcher. Each ad is shown for a limited amount of time, then cycled through. In much the same way that Wave seeks to move email and IM beyond a digital version of snail mail and phone calls, perhaps this gets us to an ad world less analogous to print.