John Simons

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

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