Google Wave Aimed to Reinvent Email
YNOT – The number of tools available for Internet-based communication has grown dramatically in recent years, a fact that has both enhanced and complicated the online experience. In addition to traditional email, there are VOIP services like Skype, instant messaging services like ICQ or AIM, and social media services like Facebook and Twitter. While it’s always a good thing to have choice and competition, making the rounds with all these different technologies can complicate the online experience; each tool comes with its own learning curve and maintenance requirements, and hopping from one tool to the next just to “check in” with everybody can absorb large sums of time in the standard workday.
It’s generally understood that different forms of online communication have different advantages. Email is great for sending a single message to one or multiple recipients, like a faster version of standard mail, but it starts to show its limitations when the goal is to hold a more advanced, multithreaded or immediate conversation. Instant messengers were developed as a tool for holding an instant text-based conversation online, an option that can eliminate the response delay inherent in the email system. Instant messengers, however, aren’t ideal for sending longer messages and generally provide limited tools for creating documented discussions. Each form of online communication that finds popularity with Internet users seems to have its own strengths and weaknesses; the result has been a growing number of applications and Web-based services that users feel compelled to load, install, learn, and maintain.
Enter Google Wave.
Google Wave is a Web-based tool for online communication and collaboration, and it combines the strengths of popular tools like email, instant messaging, social media and document sharing. The service is still under development at Google, but if Wave catches on its users could potentially have a kind of one-stop shop for engaging in online conversations.
So what exactly is this Google Wave? It helps to start by thinking of Wave as an enhanced version of email. According to Google’s own developers, Wave represents an effort to modernize email.
“Email was invented 40 years ago,” said Lars Rasmussen, a software engineering manager on the Google Wave team. “Computers and networks have dramatically improved in those four decades.”
Rasmussen said the guiding principle for Google Wave development was this question: “What might email look like if it were invented today?”
The interface for Google Wave isn’t that far off from Gmail in many respects, but instead of two columns the user is presented with three. In the left column the user sees standard controls similar to those in Gmail, plus a contacts list similar to those found in social networking services. The center column contains a list of “conversations” that Google refers to as “waves.” In a sense, this list is like the list of message subjects that you would see when loading your email client; it’s also a bit like a list of threads available on a message board. The right column contains the actual content of each conversation – this is where you’d see the typed conversation and any images or documents that are associated with the discussion.
Sometimes a product name is chosen for no other reason than it’s easy to remember and catchy, which pleases marketing people immensely. In the case of Google Wave, the name actually makes sense; a conversation in Google Wave can start small, similar to a basic one-on-one exchange in email, but it can grow in size and force as time elapses just as a wave in the ocean can pick up size and energy as it moves towards shore.
This potential for viral-like momentum, which is typical on social media sites like YouTube or Twitter, isn’t often seen as a factor in email or instant messaging. To get a sense of how this can happen with Google Wave, and how the various forms of communicating online are brought together in one service, consider the following scenario that starts very similar to an email discussion:
You start by creating a conversation with just one other person, a friend from college, asking him if he saw the baseball game last night. At this point the conversation closely resembles email; you started a new message, addressed it to your friend, typed some text, and sent. Your friend replies back that he had seen the game, comments on some of the highlights, and add that he thinks you both should hit the field yourselves someday soon for a friendly softball match with old friends.
So far so good, but here’s our first opportunity to deviate from email. In standard email, when you’re responding to multiple points from a sender, users will generally quote the entire message and then hand-edit in responses at the appropriate places. Google Wave makes this process simpler, but allowing the user to insert replies at the appropriate spot in the discussion without doubling up on text. This feature will effectively allow you to spawn off side discussions, and participants can address each thread on a separate basis.
Back to our scenario. Given that your friend has suggested a softball match, you now have an opportunity to bring more people into the discussion. You can now drag and drop icons representing other contacts from the column on the left into your discussion, the column on the right, and now those people will have access to the “wave” too. Using a nifty “playback” feature, these new arrivals can step through the discussion to see exactly how the conversation has unfolded to this point.
Also unlike email, a Google Wave discussion is dynamic. As one participant in the thread add comments or otherwise contributes to the discussion, the results show up in real time for the other participants who might be viewing the wave at that time. In fact, by default a message can show up character by character as it’s being typed so that other participants in the discussion can start to formulate their responses without having to wait for the entire message to be completed. (Participants can also choose to have their messages show up only after completed, which would be desirable when the participant wants to evaluate his or her comments before others have a chance to see them.)
Another useful feature of Google Wave is the ability to limit some comments to just certain participants in the discussion. Suppose for example that one participant in the discussion comments that he’d be an excellent choice for first base, but you know he can’t field a ball to save his life. You might choose to send a private comment to another participant suggesting a better option for first base.
Google Wave also adds nifty options for embedding content into the discussion itself, as opposed to simply linking to content. For example, you might add a map showing the location of the softball field. After the game, you can drag and drop pictures of the event from your desktop right into the conversation; Google Wave instantly creates a picture gallery.
Now we get to some really advanced features, courtesy of the Google Wave API that Google is supplying to Internet developers. Since Google Wave is designed to work with a standard Internet browser, and it’s open source, there are opportunities to integrate discussions with website content that exists outside of Google Wave.
The example that Google showed to developers recently was integration of Google Wave discussions with blogs. In this example, a user can set up a “bot” that acts something like a contact, but when dragged into the discussion it causes the contents of the “wave” to be published online to a webpage. So now when you drag and drop images from your softball game, for example, they show up on your blog as well. Better yet, when a user comments on your blog, that user’s comments could show up in your Google Wave discussion – and you can reply to that user right from your Google Wave interface.
Google Wave is still under development, and accounts are being issued right now on an invite-only basis. Still, the project is generating a lot of buzz in tech circles, so it’s worth keeping an eye on development and taking a look when Google does open up this service to the public.