John Simons

How Google Wave Helps

One of the situations that Google Wave is attempting to address is when a group of people are collaborating to solve a problem. E-mail has limitations in this front. This week, I saw a good example of these limitations.

I am part of a fantasy football league with a group of friends. This past summer we agreed to modify the format of the playoffs at the end of the season. As the playoffs approach, the architect of the new playoff system promised to give details on how it will work. Over a two day period, we had a volley of 36 e-mails involving the rules to the playoffs. In particular, there were several questions about a particular rule here or there. We also had one guy who replied to almost every attempt to answer questions with “I don’t get it.” Each of those answered quoted the entire thread that it replied to. On top of that one member of our league did not have a copy of the proposal that was voted on this summer. For some reason, he did not save a copy.

So here is where Wave works in this situation. Those 36 e-mails were all sent to all 10 members of the league, as well as to my son, who helps me. So that is a total of 396 copies of those e-mails sitting on mail servers, and for those who use a local mail client on their computers. Many of those messages are quite long as they quote the entire series of e-mails that precede them.

In addition, there are several forks in the chain of e-mails. In order to get the full picture and all of the answers to questions, you need to read most of the e-mails, because there is no one e-mail that includes every answer.

Here is where Wave excels. Rather than 396 copies of that e-mail, had we had that conversation in Wave, there would be a single Wave with all the details. Furthermore, because other users can edit the work of their colleagues, and insert text where necessary, it would be a series of commentaries on the various aspects of the rules. The group would be able to ask questions, then the answer could be filled into the appropriate part of the description and the question deleted.

This has the benefit of leaving a single Wave with all the information in a logical order, which is easier to review later. Oh yeah, and the guy who never saves e-mails would be okay, too. Because it is a Wave, it sits on a server and will always be there for him to go find. That, or someone could send him a link.

Tags: Google Wave

Google Wave – E-mail 2.0

I have been invited to use Google Wave. I get to be one of the early adopters to play with this new technology and explore whether it really is an improvement on e-mail.

Gina Trapani and Adam Pash, in the Complete Guide to Google Wave, explain the rationale for reconsidering e-mail:

Relative to the lifespan of most technology, email is ancient. Invented over 40 years ago, email predates the internet as we know it—and in fact was a crucial tool in the creation of the internet. Despite its age, email hasn’t evolved much since the 1960s. Electronic mail is based on the paradigm of postal mail, a system of passing messages back and forth between senders and recipients. Wave makes a bet: that surely there must be a better way to send, receive, preserve, and grow shared communiques than via email.

They go on to describe some of the limitations of e-mail, including redundant copies of messages, forked replies, and the static nature of a message.

Google’s engineers went back to the drawing board and thought about how communication might be done differently in this world of hosted applications and cloud computing. Google Wave is the initial result of that work.

I will try to put up a series of posts with my initial reactions to Google Wave, as well as information on how it might be useful.

Tags: Google Wave