'Google Wave in a nutshell, so far: a seamless transition between IM and email. If you want to send a full-blown email message as your response, you go ahead and do that. If you want to keep going back and forth with quick quips, you do that. The mechanisms are there to fully support both a long near-real-time email exchange and a quick chat, with robust support for groups, not just pairs of people.
A rough English translation of Google Wave:
wave = thread (or a particular chat session, if you like, but it acts more like an email thread)
blip = message (an individual email message or chat statement)
To better enable this seamless transition between chat and email, Google Wave has minimize-and-maximize controls that extend the usual window management metaphor: maximize a Wave and it presents more like an email exchange. Minimize it and it's a little chat-style window. You get to decide how to perceive it.
Everything else feels like a decoration of the above, so far. At least, it does if you've been using GMail and Google Chat for a long time. GMail already supported search of your chat history, and delivery by email if the other person logs off. And YouTube links already offered an inline player in Google Chat. So the multimedia-ness is less of an event if that's what you're already accustomed to.
What's new here is the seamlessness, the certainty that you're using the right medium regardless of the length of what you have to say or the time you want to take saying it. While Google Chat was searchable, it wasn't right in the same thread with email, and the transition between them was a little awkward.
Now, something I'm not crazy about is the "looky look you can see what I'm typing as I type it" factor. Seriously: if I wanted to worry about getting chewed out for my first choice of words, I'd call you.
Still, I think this feature
might be worth it because it balances the weirdness of wondering whether you should wait while someone decides to compose a lengthy email-like response instead of a chat-style quip. I'm thinking about it. I'll make up my mind when it gets me fired or saves me from writing War and Peace in response to the wrong question, whichever comes first.
* * *
Okay, that was my very firstest impression, before I cheated and went peekin' at detailed overviews of Wave. Glad I got that down honestly before doing too much homework and drinking too much kool-aid.
That having been said, some interesting things I missed:
People are saying it is "wiki-like." That's because you can edit other people's "blips" (aka messages... whether they be little chatty ones or long email-y ones). This is downright weird the first time you do it. "Really? I can just click Edit and change things so that John says he's a monkey and he owes me $50?"
Yeah, you can, but then the blip is attributed to "you and John," not just John. So don't get too excited about the sabotage potential. Though I definitely see confusion arising here.
Related to that is the ability to embed an entire Wave in a web page. I'm not yet certain how that works in practice.
The email-like-ness of Wave introduces other new concepts from a chat perspective. You can have a quick little chat in which twenty things are said, and go back tomorrow and reply to the third thing the other guy said, just as you could do in an email or forum conversation.
One of the biggest differences: you can introduce new people to a wave at any time. And when you do my understanding is that they have access to the complete history of the wave, including the ability to walk through the whole thing in chronological order, bringing themselves up to date with the spirit of the thing as they might in a forum or blog thread. This solves a number of common problems with group chats and emails, but also poses new challenges: how do you integrate people without making them privy to the embarrassing details of your decision to bring them aboard? So far I don't think you really can. You can delete your own blips, but it would take a great deal of coordination to clean up a slightly dicey conversation for a newcomer's consumption. I think you'd be forced to start another wave in that situation.
Chat and email are the most obvious metaphors for what Google Wave provides, but Wave has other features as well, things whose best analogies are in forums, livejournal and the like. You can easily add a simple poll to a Wave ("do you like this? Yes / No / Maybe") to gather opinions from participants.
All of these features, coupled with the sheer usability of the thing, are apt to make it a popular tool once a critical mass of users have access to it. Facebook was much the same way: they built a core feature set that was actually useful and not annoying for communicating with your people, and people came.
But that leads me to one important difference between Wave's rollout and that of Facebook: Facebook was consciously rolled out to entire intact communities, like high schools and colleges. That guaranteed that even before the whole world was on Facebook, you had
someone to talk to about meaningful things (um... more meaningful than MySpace, anyway).
So far I'm not seeing that on Wave. I know a few people who have access to it, but with the exception of one coworker, most of us don't have cause for such a high level of collaboration. We're occasional emailers, occasional chatters, old friends flung about the planet. Will we really use Wave to its full potential? Only by conscious effort. Heck, right now Wave doesn't even email me to remind me that things are happening, something Facebook has always done.
I think Google should concentrate on making Wave available to intact groups, or else provide members with a significant number of invitations to give out in a single burst so that they can make a decision to bring their real-life professional circle or personal circle aboard at one pop and really
use this puppy. If that means that fewer invites can be given out to individuals not yet part of the puzzle, then slow that process down. More important to grow the number of people who are truly getting the point.
* * *
Another notable feature: support for third-party widgets. Anyone can write a widget that integrates into Wave, and any user with access to the site hosting it can insert that widget into waves as they see fit. This clearly has tremendous potential, as waves will soon be able to carry business data like live sales and inventory, emergency notifications, source code commits and warnings to order more coffee beans.
And that leads to the last and hopefully most important feature: open source. Google has promised to release the code to their implementation, and they have
already made good on significant parts of that promise. And Google says Wave is intended to support federation between different hosts. In other words, if Microsoft and Yahoo want to host Google Wave servers of their own, they are welcome to do that, and their users will be able to share waves with Google users.
I get the distinct impression Google feels they have hit on something so big and potentially universal, yet so critically dependent on user goodwill for its growth, that it would be a mistake to try to lock it down. Better to let the appetite for Wave grow without the distraction of worrying about vendor lock-in and arguing about competing incompatible implementations of the idea now that the crucial notions are out there in the ether. From what I've seen so far, I hope they're right.
(P.S. Thanks for the invite Art)
Tags: email, geek, google wave, im, web
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