Nov
5
WRITTEN BY:
David Cummins
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Google Wave is being sold as ‘email re-imagined’, changing which part of email is where. In email, the messages are the entities sent across the ethernet, mirroring the mental model of real-world traditional mail. Wave, instead, hosts the conversation.
In making this shift of focus, from individual messages to entire conversations, Wave brings a lot of advantages.
- Everyone involved in a conversation can review the entire history of the conversation, from the start.
- Attachments stay in place, instead of getting lost in the inbox somewhere.
- Everyone invited into a conversation stays in the conversation, without requiring participants to manage an ever-expanding address list!
In short, Wave remedies a bunch of usability faults of email by changing the focus from the message to the conversation.
Given this point of view of working with conversations instead of messages, it is easier to see Google Wave for what it really is. Wave is a communally-edited real-time wiki. Sure, on the surface, it might give you the impression that it is similar to Outlook, or GMail, but don't let that fool you. Even the Instant Message-like ‘blips’ that form the inline replies are again a distraction from the true worth of Wave.
Wave enables your entire organisation to co-operate on documenting what it is they want to do, and how they are going to do it, in real-time. In fact, this blog article was collaborated on using Google Wave.
The Google Wave team talks of holding meetings with participants spread from Mountain View to Sydney, and having the meetings come to conclusions in half the time of face-to-face video links. They even talk of people not coming to meetings, but attending virtually by monitoring the Wave record of the meeting in progress, and giving their input to the meeting by editing the Wave while the meeting is in progress.
This allows participants in the Wave to determine the most appropriate way in which they are going to contribute. In addition, because the Wave retains the timeline of the conversation, participants can always playback how particular decisions were reached and/or review a section of the wave that they felt was more important before it was edited.
At Frame, we are looking at Wave to quickly bring teams together to make informed decisions for our clients, whether it is to solve a new problem or to respond to an issue with one of their services. We see that Wave bots can add value by automatically creating Waves and inviting appropriate experts to collaborate and diagnose the fault based on system event triggers.
This technology enables a new form of interaction that integrates your entire business towards a unified direction. Everyone can become part of the decision-making process, not just the loudest at the table. Wave will be a mental and paradigm shift for many businesses, but those that choose to leverage it early will be at the forefront of the next generation of communication technology.
This blog was co-written with Brett Morgan.