Google Wave and the emergence of intelligent advertising bots

People have been pretty excited about Google Wave since its unveiling. Most of this excitement though has been triggered by its new communication possibilities from the user point of view (synchronous multiparty collaboration, threaded messages, extended functionality through wavelets, etc.)

But what about Google’s plan to monetize it? What about the ads they most likely will want to display inside a wave? Plain non-flashy text boxes like the ones discreetly displayed in gMail? A sidebar full of ads like in a search results page?

Or.. what about forgetting the tried-and-true dumb visual ad that is asking for two milliseconds of eyeball attention and instead act boldly and create ‘intelligent ad robots’ who can actually assist you to accomplish any activity you are trying to in a non-intrusive and natural way? That would be something different and way more interesting for companies that want to avoid the classic ad bombarding to the masses and instead laser target their consumers in a more friendly way.

So far, the lineup of robots available now for gWave is not very extensive but it is already big enough to helps us understand the huge potential of having virtual agents inside a wave who can analyze the conversation, look for related data, and communicate back to the human participants inside the wave itself.

It is not difficult to imagine a ‘travel planner’ robot that would be added to a wave you just created with your friends in order to plan your next summer trip. As you start throwing around ideas about locations, dates, and budget with your friends, this travel robot would analyze the conversation and bring you travel suggestions from sponsoring companies related to the travel industry (airlines, travel companies, hospitality, etc..). Everybody would win here: you save a lot of time you would have spent digging for deals, and the travel companies can offer their products to a very receptive and  targeted audience. Oh, and Google makes some cents for every ‘touchpoint’ a robot does inside a wave. Deal!

There is one 'but' though. Will people really allow someone foreign to their group of friends to ‘interfere’ with their travel plans? Probably yes, but it will all depend on the way the robot's behavior is designed. Too intrusive, out. Too low quality suggestions, out. Too inaccurate, out. Too passive, out. Not easy to get it right. That’s the fine line engineers, designers, social researchers and anyone involved in designing these robots will have to walk. Unless these ad robots act as minimally amicable humans and provide a useful suggestions service, ads inside gWave will pretty much look like all the ads we have seen so far: a simple and ignorable chunk of text.

[photo: 'Fortune telling robot' by Paul Keller]