What an exciting week of new technology announcements. Between the Google Wave, Microsoft Zune HD and Hulu Desktop, it is hard to know where to start. If I had to rank them, Wave sits at the top of the innovation richter scale. Here are some of my initial impressions.
Making Sense of Disjointed Discussions
Google made the announcement of their well kept secret, Google Wave, at the I/O conference this week. Wave is Google’s attempt at evolving Internet communication and collaboration into real-time contextual discussions.
If you think about how e-mail has changed over the past 10 years, then you probably come to same conclusion as most people: It hasn’t changed much. The user interface may have been updated but you are still sending, replying and forwarding messages back and forth. The change on the communication front has come mostly from the introduction of Instant Messenger, micro-blogging apps and social networking sites. And if you consider blogs and wikis as additional methods of communication, then there are a lot of discussions going on outside of e-mail.
The drawback to all of these rich discussions is that they can become disjointed fairly quickly and keeping everything within context for yourself, let alone other participants can be complicated.
Take the situation when someone sends you and a colleague of yours an e-mail and you both reply with comments to that original e-mail. There are now exists two versions of that thread. Take it one step further and you IM the sender with a question about the first part of the e-mail. Well now that IM converstaion is completely missing from the thread of the e-mail and only two of you in the discussion know about it. The situation gets even more complex if someone starts referencing comments from a blog, flickr or youtube. See how the conversation is now taking places in multple places without any ability to being them together under the same conversation?
Now I’m not sure you can solve the problem of managing all of these communications by building super apps that integrate e-mail, twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc… into a single UI. There are apps today that present your twitter and facebook streams in a single interface but there are limitations in how you search, edit and share the data with other users. Additionally, there is a lack of awareness of the same conversation taking place in the various conmmunications forms that contributes to the problem I describe above. Then of course is the e-mail threading confusion of having multiple concurrent threads taking place which gets even worse when you look at conversations withing twitter and blog comments.
Re-imaging Communication
E-mail has only incrementally changed and not really adapted to the new way communication over the Web is taking place. Gmail’s threading view of e-mail conversations is useful but is more of a hack of e-mail. During the presentation announcing Wave, one line really stood out to me. ”Wave is what e-mail would look like if it was invented today.”
Google Wave Interface
Think of taking all of the communication sources (twitter, facebook, linkedin, instant messengers, blogs, e-mail) plus the rich media available in photo, graphic and videos sharing sites and simply dumping them into a vat. Then go through all of the data organize it into logical contextual discussions taking place between users. Finally mix in the capability to search anything, edit anywhere and have the changes reflected real-time so everyone in the conversation is looking at the same information irregardless of where the communication is taking place. That is a lot to take in which is why the video below does a good job of demonstrating the potential.
There is a fear that changing all of the above will make the user experience much more complicated. If you once again go back to the original scenario I speak about, it becomes clear that the mishmash of today’s communication streams has already made the experience complictated. Users and vendors have just adopted this as the everyday way of doing business.
Opening things Up
In addition to all of the features around communication and discussion, Google Wave is also being rolled out as an open source platform with the ability to create extensions. The is one of the areas in which Wave sets itself apart and maybe how it eventually wins as a communication/collaboration platform. The developer community is an extremly important aspect to succeed in today’s enterprise software space. Salesforce.com has done an amazing job creating a developer community. Apple and Google have similarly built a development community for their mobile platforms.
Google’s expertise is dealing with data and that is exactly where Wave shines. There was much to ooh and ahh about during the 1 hour presentation which you can catch below. There are a few very good examples of how communication can change into a real-time discussion and how that discussion benefits. I have picked out a few highlights and listed the timestamp in case you just want to see the cool stuff right away, but I recommend watching the entire presentation.
Video Highlights
- Integration of e-mail with in-line comments a la instant messenging at 8:45 in the video.
- Have richer discussions in blogs by embedding Waves at 20:40 in the video.
- Collaboratively author documents at 27:50 the video.
- Wave collaboration showing inline editing and real-time conversation at 31:30 in the video. Also take note of the ‘Playback’ capability.
- Wave and Twitter integration example at 57:30 in the video.
- Wave and issue tracker integration (i.e. bugzilla) at 1:01:50 in the video.
- Real-time tranlsation of conversation to French and English at 1:12:00 in the video.
Much has been said about the announcement, the technology and it’s application in the real world. I’ll cover more about Wave and my impressions in a future post. In the meantime you can take a look at what others are saying.
Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web
Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?
Google Wave To Bring Web 2.0 Lifestyle to Work
Tags: collaboration, communication, facebook, google wave, microblogging, twitter
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