It’s Christmas morning, and you’re 5 years old. You rush downstairs before everyone else and start tearing into that one gift that’s been teasing you with its shiny wrapping and big red bow for what seems like forever. Shreds of paper begin to rain down as your eyes widen at the sight of… a brand new chemistry set.

That’s pretty much how I felt about Google Wave when I first looked received my invite. It could be awesome… later, once I actually figure out what to do with it. But because it’s in limited beta right now, there aren’t really enough people that I can interact with in order to take advantage of all of its features. … Ok, a chemistry set isn’t really a social device, but you get my drift.

Don’t get me wrong. I “get” why it’s awesome. I just haven’t been able to experience it for myself. Depending on how long it’s in beta (which is likely to be quite some time, given their track record with their other products) I suppose the userbase will grow, and soon we’ll all be engaged in really rich conversations about the most recent episode of House, or how much I loathe green peppers or something.

That’s one of the things that amuses me about the mass audience (myself included). We seem to crave really cool, ever advancing technology to perform the simplest of tasks. The vast assortment of new applications dedicated to interesting ways to churn out 140 character posts on Twitter is proof of this. What do any of these apps do that’s really THAT much different from sending a text message to one or more people? Further, given that there IS a difference, how many of us take full advantage of even the most basic features? Given the iconic nature of the image below, I’m willing to bet it isn’t many.

If you’ve seen any of the trailer videos for Google Wave, they make a pretty good case for how it could be used in the course of daily events. A near seamless blending of email/IM/texting etc., making the sharing of information that much easier. But given the ever present challenge of convincing people to change their online habits (IE is still the leading web browser, despite Firefox/Chrome/Safari being better products in my opinion), I’m a little apprehensive about how fast this will take place. This isn’t merely a new tool, it’s a new toolset that’s going to require people to change the way they think about how they communicate.

I guess, as with most things, we shall wait and see. If anyone else out there has access to Wave and wants to give it a spin, drop me a line at my Gmail account (Chris DOT Baboolal).

Back in 2002, the individuals behind Clueless Mailers distributed a massive diagram that illustrated just how endemic the problem of spam really is. For the first time, you could actually see how various networks connected and collaborated with one another across the globe, to ensure that you had an endless supply of messages in your inbox promising you untold Nigerian fortunes and more manhood than you can shake a stick at… so to speak.

Click to check out the full version of the map

Well, there’s now an updated version that you can access at Spamworld which uses the Google Maps API to track known IPs of networks that contribute to spam traffic on the Internet, in real time (There are other lists out there, but it’s difficult to glean where their numbers are coming from). Looking at the map, it’s not that surprising to see a large number of spam coming from Asia. Which is not to say that the Asian populace is being shady on purpose. It’s merely that there are a lot more people there, and hence the opportunity to set up a relevant infrastructure is that much higher. Almost 2300 IPs carry spam traffic from Turkey, which is almost equivalent to the number from China. Equally strange is the absence of information out there that attempts to explain why.

Perhaps there a lot of server clusters in Turkey that are unwittingly being used by bots and other computer networks as a relay point for spam from elsewhere. Perhaps it’s a viable economic venture for a small group of people in Turkey that have figured out how to exploit the system. Who knows for sure?

But it gets a little weirder than that. Try doing a Google Search for TurkTelecom (Search for “TTnet” – I’ll leave the actual URL off of here) and see what happens. On the first page of results you get links for:

- A Chinese Parts Manufacturer
- A forum about the Nissan Twin Turbo
- A few Training Networks
- An Internet Services Company that has a rock band … or something
- A Textile Company
- The Mongolian Embassy (which,… strangely is linked from the proper TTnet parent domain)

It’s only when you get to page 2 that you actually hit anything that resembles the TTnet site. You’ll also find the Wikipedia entry for the site, which is an orphaned article that has very little info. It has an Alexa rating below the 5000 mark, making it one of the top 5000 visited sites in the world (to put this into perspective, a site like Wired.com falls just over the 1000 mark, whereas McDonalds.com is over the 8000 mark).

It’s an interesting little paradox. This prolific hermit of a entity phases in and out of existence depending on how you look at it.

The stream of consciousness that led to the writing of this post was interesting, if not a little chaotic. I was responding to some instant messages from within Gmail when another one popped up on Windows Live Messenger. I started thinking about how many instant messaging/sharing services/social networks and platforms there are out there and how that diversity affects the way that we communicate with each other. Copying and pasting links into email/ims used to be the predominant way to show someone something of interest online. Today however, you’d be hard pressed to find any application or web-based product that didn’t have some sort of sharing/messaging component attached to it. Granted, many of the major players have worked in some form of interoperability. But there does seem to be a constant battle between merging forms of communication and yet remaining as distinct as possible. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of social bookmarking. The need for this separation is obvious, if you consider that each method of communication represents the voice of a brand that’s trying to be as loud as possible in order to remain competitive. Enter aggregate sharing services like Share This, Add This, and the Sociable plugin for WordPress, which attempt to inject some order into the chaos.

Click the image to enlarge.

So what does this mean in terms of how we communicate online? What does this mean to marketers?

Well, there are a couple of things worth noting here. The tools that are germane to both of the communication pathways I mentioned will continue to get released. As they do, people will continue to have a myriad of options for spreading viral content. I think the key will be having an understanding of the longevity of the message that underlies that content. Viral videos for example, have a relatively short window to get people interested enough to execute a call to action and visit a website or submit an email address. If those destination websites are interesting in and of themselves, you might be lucky enough to score a conversion and/or get people to return. That being understood, the viral content that got them interested in the first place might be spread through focused bursts via”smaller” channels; IM, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. But if those users find a compelling reason to act afterward, that’s when they might choose to increase the size of the audience for that content and make use of the aggregate sharing services. It’s almost as if the focused pathways allow for a type of proving ground among smaller peer groups in order to decide if the content has the appropriate “A-ha” factor before it proliferates throughout the Cloud.

Finally, I completely appreciate the fact that as of right now there is no easy way to spread the content of this post anywhere. That will change as I adapt to a theme that allows for extra widgets.