I’ve been using the alpha version of google wave for about a month and a half, and I have to say that I’m a fan. This post is mostly about saying why I’m a fan and also why I think that google wave is going to change the way we communicate through text.

The reason I’m writing this post is because there are a lot of people who have heard bits about it or just haven’t spent the time using it and really can’t see  why this is such a big deal. Hopefully this post will go some way towards convincing you of it’s merit, but feel free to add your own insights in as comments.

Google Wave has been described by Google as what email would look like had it been designed in the 21st century.  Wave is standing on the shoulders of giants, it reflects the evolution of internet communication by bringing together mature concepts as the principals or requirements of their system and uses new technology to hold it all together. It’s worth keeping this in mind when you think about the future of Google Wave. It may be new, but there is so much to this that we’ve seen before. My first reaction on using Google Wave was, “Is that it?”.  The real shocker was when after a short time using Google Wave I was coming back to my trusty MSN messenger and finding it unpleasant to use.

In order to explain exactly what Google Wave is, I want you to focus on what email is today. These are the differences:

• Forums and Threading
  If you have multiple people involved in an email conversation or you are just talking to one person about multiple things it starts to get ugly fairly quickly, email is not designed to handle this. The reason is that email is plain text, there is no natural order to it. Any complex communication is going to require the ability to separate out who and what each piece of the communication is in reply to. In a forum it is designed to allow you to reply to a particular part of a post letting everyone know what was the communication you replied to and who wrote the communication in the first place. The majority of forums don’t use threading, so it’s quite likely that you have never actually seen it in use even if you’ve visited forums.
  Threading is about when a reply is made to a post where does that post go on the screen. A modern web based forum would place it at the bottom because that is the simplest solution, and back during the time when any 2 browsers were unlikely same html page the same way, back when forums on the web emerged, keeping things simple was essential to get people onto your website. What used to happen before the web took off was that the post would appear under the post it replied to and slightly indented to the right so that you end up with a tree of posts. This makes conversations far more readable. Each communication has context, even if many other communications have taken place since.
  Another thing that Wave has taken from Forums is the idea of a topic, a topic in a forum is a posts container. A topic is similar to the first mail in an email conversation. It defines the subject of the conversation and that mail is replied to. The difference between a topic and
  So why not just use forums instead? Forums focus on an idea, it’s a place that people go to discuss with the other people that have decided to do the same. Email and Wave are about communicating with the specific people you have chosen to communicate with.
• Instant Messaging
  Email takes a while to arrive at it’s destination, it has to go from your computer to your Internet Service Provider’s server and from their server to your recipient’s ISP’s server and from there to your recipients machine. This process is not designed to be instant, if you want instant communication you should use instant messaging. Unlike email you have to be sure that the person is online at the time, and while most instant messaging clients are able to keep logs the logs are seen as separate to the current conversation. A conversation ends when you close the chat window. Unlike email where the conversation ends only when you stop replying to it, that could be several weeks from when it started. The benefits of both are brought into Google Wave. When both your recipient(s) and yourself are online, messages appear instantly, and when one of you goes offline, you can still continue communicating and they can see what you have sent when they return.
• Wiki
  You can’t go change what you’ve written in an email. Once it has been sent that’s it. A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages (taken from wikipedia). With a wiki you are able to create a page, edit that page, have someone else edit that page and have a history of all the edits that have been made. That is what Wave allows you to do, the history function isn’t fast enough or detailed enough at the time of this writing but you can edit any communication that you have made as can anyone else involved in that conversation. That means that you can correct any information or update it as information changes. The communication is marked as unread as soon as it is edited, it displays above each communication which users have contributed.
• Blogging
  If you read a lot of blogs you need a feed reader, it lists all the posts you haven’t yet read and the good ones allow you to read the post without visiting anyone’s website. Unfortunately not everyone is aware of the feed reader and Blogs tend to have a smaller number of regular readers as a result. The email alternative to this is a newsletter, a regular email is sent to each person on the subscription list and this allows people to passively check for updates. The problem with this approach that I’ve discovered from an end user perspective is that everything that is developed around email including the email receiving software itself isn’t designed for this type of communication. There is no in built way to subscribe and unsubscribe from a newsletter within the email client you have to rely on the sender to provide a method of removing yourself from their mailing list. Google Wave allows the creation of read only waves that you can follow and unfollow as you choose. The difference is small but important. Users have the power over what they subscribe to and any actions associated with the wave apply to any future posts on that wave, you also get a full history of that wave once added so you can see any future communication in context.

I didn’t try to cover everything that Wave can do. I just picked on a few things, try it out for yourself, give it some time and comment your experiences.

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