I just finished watching Google’s early preview of Google Wave for developers. The concept is very cool and is built on the question “what if email were invented today?” All I can say is WOW! This thing is so robust and an amazing way of revolutionizing communication, collaboration and web site integration. Even if you aren’t a technically oriented person I encourage you to watch the video at http://wave.google.com.
Here is what I think are the awesome implications of this innovative product. First of all it does a nice job of poking fun at how inefficient and poorly constructed today’s email system and behavior are. Of course years ago I doubt anyone could have imagined all of the ways we interact and communicate today with email, social networks, twitter, blogging, sms, chat, VOIP and others cluttering up our lives. But Google is asking the right question, what if email were invented today? At first glance Wave looks to answer the complex question aggregating in real time everything we struggle to keep up with today. We are so over saturated with communications in various forms I find people are starting to give up on keeping up and are choosing their communication “style” and forcing people to conform.
How do you answer the question “what is the best way to get a hold of you?” I know when I ask people this question I get a wide variety of responses like send me an email, call my cell, friend me on Facebook, text me, and combinations of all of them. You will even have people tell you things like “I only communicate by email”. We have become so cluttered with communications tools we are getting frustrated to the point of just choosing one we feel comfortable with and trying to make everyone conform to it.
This is what Wave is attempting to solve and in doing so found solutions to other collaboration and communications problems facing individuals and companies today. The thought of pulling it all together in a digestible and collaborative methodology is unequivocally compelling. Gmail was a strong step for email with it’s search ability, conversation threading and other tools but it is only one piece of the communications puzzle. The ability of Wave to collectively edit, update and serve up content in real time by all at the same time should be quite scary and/or exciting to enterprise software developers of collaborative applications.
From the little I have seen of Wave and the open source nature of the architecture we could very well see the birth of the next generation of not just email but maybe all of our messy web communications and real time content management issues.
Now, lets hope it gets adopted and takes off enough to accomplish this lofty goal instead of just landing in the tall scrap heap of abandoned Google projects.
