Google Wave - Good, Bad or Ugly?
Google's Wave platform has begun to get some serious traction in the tech world. Touted as "email for the 21st century" Google has endeavoured to change the way we look at communications. iIt's not enough that they own a huge slice of the global email market, search, cartography and a bunch of other stuff, they're now trying to invade all of our communications.
As best as I can tell Google Wave is a mash-up of email, instant messaging, Twitter and document sharing. In Google's own words:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
I've started playing with Wave and, while it's certainly an interesting concept, I'm struggling to see how it's going to replace my email or change what I'm doing now.
Wave is certainly a disruptive technology. It may do for communication and collaboration what Napster did for music and Bittorrent did for video distribution but it's going to rely on a lot of people moving away from systems that, despite limitations, are familiar and work. Fior me, Wave's challenge will be to move me away from my email client - a core part of my productivity toolkit - into something new.
Perhaps if Google's ingenuity is put to building a platform that can keep the spammers out Wave will have a chance to usurp our reliance on email.
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3 comments
I'm going to use it and see if others join as well. -- Marge--
http://margekatherine.blogspot.com/
Napster changed how people envisioned getting access to music. Instead of visiting a music store and buying plastic CDs, they could download them from their computer. Plugin the name of the artist, a song and whamo, the song is delivered right in the comfort of your dorm.
Google Wave consolidates a number of messaging/collaboration platforms into a single, consistent vision of the data, the protocols and the user experience.
The extent to which wave is disruptive will be determined by the extent to which Google allows for real federation of the protocol. They've already started to do that. I think this is important, especially in higher-ed, because it means that institutions will be able to host their own Wave servers... integrated with their own security infrastructure, maintained on their own hardware.
In cases of research communities with secure facility requirements, this could be huge.
For customers looking to adopt Google-hosted solutions for their student populations but preferring to keep internal systems for faculty and high-security facilities, federation could mean using a consistent, standard technology and approach while being able to be selective about what you outsource and what you keep in house.
I can see how Wave may become disruptive - it's
just that I'm struggling to move from what I do today to what Wave can do for me.
Clearly, you've given this a significant amount of thought and I thank you for your insights.
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Humans are gregarious creatures so it makes sense to use the net to socialise. Anthony Caruana gets down and dirty with how people use the Internet to satisfy their need to get together.
