Many people have declared email to be dead in the past, and they’ve all been wrong. The typical play has been from instant messenger advocates, and most recently from Facebook. But, while these options have been a valid all-encompassing solution for teenagers and students, I haven’t met a single serious modern IT user whose life isn’t still driven primarily by email. There’s a reason that Outlook and Exchange are such consistent cash cows for Microsoft, and so many business people own Blackberrys. IM, Facebook & Twitter may represent certain facets of your online existence, but if push really came to shove, and you were only allowed to use one electronic service, I bet you every gadget I own that almost everyone will opt to keep their email over anything else.
I certainly could not operate without my email, but after watching the demo of Google Wave, I saw for the first time something that could genuinely be better, without leaving me with a gaping functionality hole in the name of ‘progress’. In retrospect, the idea seems incredibly obvious, but I’m sure the implementation was tricky.
In essence, Google Wave is basically a fusion of email and IM functionality. You still compose emails, reply to them, and include people in the threads, but the whole functionality set can also operate basically in real-time, just like an IM client. Whether something is instantly transmitted interactively depends on whether the person you’re sending it to is online, and some preferences of your own. There were some nice geeky demo things like instant translation via a bot too, but the most important thing to me was how holistic it was. One of the major problems I have is connected with using a mixture of IM and email communication, particularly with clients but also friends. I might remember that I had a conversation with X about Y, and want to go refresh my memory about it, but I don’t remember whether we talked about it on email, or on IM (and whether it was Skype, GTalk, MSN, and which machine I was on at the time). Looking up this information is a pain, because my email is one island of information, and my IM conversations are many separate islands. Being able to search across the whole thing in one swoop, from any PC/device, and see all the conversations, both deferred email-like and instant, all in their original threaded contexts, would be absolutely fantastic. It would give me value in my working life, instantly, right now.
They could go even further, by supporting VOIP calls through it too, and have the option to use voice recognition to transcribe it (or record it as well), or even just to log that the conversation happened and allow me to add a few manual notes to it. I’d imagine this would be early on the list of extensions, by Google themselves or by external developers, since they’re encouraging people to use the API. And I can imagine that linking all this up with Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Docs etc will have a multiplicative effect.
So I’m pretty excited about Wave. It’s the first collaboration tool I’ve seen that could genuinely replace my email (and IM), although I’d then have to tackle the very real question of whether I really want to give Google control of such critical parts of my electronic life.
June 1st, 2009 at 5:51 pm
You missed some key features there Steve. The biggest is that Google wave will be entirely open source, and that includes its protocol. You will be able run your own wave server that can communicate with other wave servers, be they Google’s or another companies. So Google will not be in control of that part of your life.
You also didn’t touch on the wiki and plugin aspects of wave. Things like the spell checker, and translator are just default plugins that Google runs with its own wave server. The wiki like aspect comes with the ability to edit other messages in real time, like a souped up version of google docs.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Ok, that’s cool – I didn’t have time to watch the entire hour (!!) of the video so I missed these things, I thought just the plugin API would be open source. That’s pretty damn awesome if I can run my own ‘leaf’ server in the Wave network.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Watch 0:35 and 1:15 – it’s amazing.
Especially 0:35 – collaborative editing.
This could replace Wiki, Forum, online meetings, Facebook, Twitter, StackOverflow, Digg..
Of course, they want Wave to be the new standard.
Imagine having access to peoples thoughts, everywhere, in real time..
June 1st, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Yes looks awesome.
I think the talk about leaf servers, google not being in control etc was at about 1:09
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:01 pm
There are a few blogs etc. trying to downplay this. If this thing works as shown (without the bugs) it will be pretty damn neat.
This page is about the protocol and how they’re trying to keep it open so others can run their own wave servers: http://www.waveprotocol.org/. Of course the question becomes: Who would bother to implement one? Maybe it works for you personally, but would you really invest the time, or would you just use Google’s? It might work from an intranet standpoint, but a public implementation probably isn’t worth the effort involved
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June 3rd, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Does it require the recipient to have wave too?
Then I can’t see it replacing email for one-time connections. Like, if I want to ask one of my teachers something about a test at the end of the semester. Would I bother to check if he had wave or to start a thread? I’d just send an email I think. But you never know =)
June 4th, 2009 at 9:40 am
My assumption is that if the recipient is not on Wave, it will just operate like normal GMail, which already threads regular email conversations. Not sure but that would make sense.
June 4th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
So how would we archive or sign Waves for using it in business environments?
This might be a problem.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
I dig the playback feature.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:45 am
“So how would we archive or sign Waves for using it in business environments?
This might be a problem.”
Well first I will assume you are using you own business server running its wave server. I would just create a plugin that can “tag” a certain revision of the wave. Tagging would automatically sign it with a certificate and have it copied to a new un-editable wave. This would be similar to how source control works.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
With E3 and work being busy I’ve really fallen behind on news
. Watched the Wave presentation over the past 2 days. Was really impressed by what they have to offer, although as you said it is obvious when you think about it.
@Steve: They showed off integration of Wave with other web sites like Orkut. The user could have a conversation with a Orkut (non Wave) user and it would update Orkut page and the Wave. Obviously this would only apply to services with integration, but I found that pretty cool.
July 26th, 2009 at 11:46 am
The biggest problem it solves is that you no longer have to write “See comments inline”
http://sachendra.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/email-2-0-google-wave-solves-the-see-comments-inline-problem/