Google Wave - First Impressions
solidstategroup.com
solidstategroup.com
The question is do we really need to replace email? It has obviously served us well for so long. If you think about the "what would email have looked like if invented today?" question that Google was trying to answer, you start realizing that there are so many limitations in the current model.
How? I think Wave will be a win when everyone with a Gmail inbox has a Wave inbox automatically. Then, if you're communicating with other Wave users, you get tons of added benefits (which slowly everyone else is going to want). Otherwise, they can simply interface it to send good old fashioned emails to "old" addresses.
Wave is computing 2.0. And I don't say that lightly.
It aims to do no less than gut and replace the core folder, file and application metaphors. It's a Newton-esque data object soup + internet, with the role of applications and workflow largely relegated to anthropomorphic services.
That's why the "wave = a + b + c" metaphors ring so hollow; it's a new conceptual model for computing that does not directly map to the old one.
And that is what makes its future so murky.
I think the browser and intervening decades have changed habits and expectations enough to give Wave a better chance than those who've presented such things before. But I also think the single smartest move Google did, was enable the building of seamless bridges in-to and out-of the Wave model.
Being Google will let them get their foot in the door. But allowing people to make a wave from a simple word document and save a wave off to a PDF or simple email will give them time to make their case.
But it's still an uphill battle.
I'll be very interested to see if Google releases some facsimile of Google Docs that are Wave-enabled and allow for full real-time editing/collaboration. Combine that with the email & SMS killer, and I believe Google has a viable alternative to Office + Exchange + Windows. The unifying element of the Wave acts to capture a company's workflow. In the end, business will want to use this instead of the MS solution because it provides more business value that the sum of the parts (IM + email + office suite + workflow), and it does so in a way that MS cannot. Companies can extend the Wave to add further business value to the whole approach with the Wave API. Finally, with the whole thing being open-sourced, companies will be able to run their own servers (something I think is critical to mass acceptance of the technology within corporations).
It is an ambitious project. I hope Google succeeds. I am watching it closely, and look forward to my own invitation. I already can see a number of areas where I would like to build my robots & gadgets.
With email, there already existed norms which could be taken from real life and applied to the new electronic analogue. So the new technology dropped pretty neatly into an existing cultural structure - which then evolved.
But Google Wave knows no such existing cultural structure I can think of - perhaps there are certain etiquette rules that apply to multiple people talking in a group at a party while simultaneously writing on a single piece of paper. But if there are, I don't know them.
So adopters of Google Wave will face social challenges as well as technological ones, and I don't think Google has really thought this through as well as they've structured the protocols and technical infrastructure. Start to consider Google Wave being used in a corporate environment, and you've got legal and commercial challenges on top of that - I shudder to think how a contractual discussion could be conducted over Google Wave. You might answer that it won't be, we'll still rely on email, but if we do, then why add another communication channel?
We shall see - though it speaks of how deeply Wave challenges current paradigms of online communication that no-one - least of all me - is prepared to offer concrete predictions regarding how it will be used.
That's it! Google Wave is Pictionary!
But I think the way Wave will get around this is by being used first primarily not as a communications tool, but as a collaboration tool.
When you're a business or other team trying to get a project done, you use the tool that lets you work together most efficiently, and you don't care if it feels more like IM or email or a wiki (wikis, here's something with no offline equivalent and whose mainstream usage took off like a rocketship), and so that's how I think it will get traction.
From that point forward, as people use it as a collaboration tool, they'll seamlessly come to use it as a communication tool, and it might progressively replace email and IM (and social networking?), as I believe it can if it's indeed as good as it sounds.
As for contracts, Wave retains a versioned change history that can be replayed, and certainly has a better guarantee of authenticity than unsigned email.
http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism....
"Licklider's messages and examples on the screen now involve fill-ins and subroutines and modeling. He shows how he can program his computer to make dinner arrangements when he goes to a certain city: if the first person invited can't have dinner, his computer scans the list of his other friends in the same city and issues dinner invitations to them . All this in a simple conditional language."
but wait, there's more,
"Agents will handle "augmented telephone calls," stacking the calls and pushing them through automatically. Agents will pay your bill, checking them against the appropriate invoices in standard electronic forms. They will sniff out information a friend may have set out: his birthday, gift preferences and sizes, party invitations, information he would like from whoever knows it."
It's not obvious what you can do with the system easily. I spent about 10 mins trying to tag up a google map whilst other people did the same, the result being a map dragging fight and trying to type in a description before someone deletes the pin.
In summary... er... It might be useful for small internal groups of people you know, but it's going to need some marketing and training.
Could you see a company hosting it internally and manage permissions via Active Directory or LDAP groups to allow collaboration on documents or discussion groups?
Does it have potential to help the information overload that plagues corporate email (or maybe it will make it worse).
Calendaring? Does it even exist in the Wave universe?
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