Something that’s been bugging me about the Google Wave interface are the
icons that show you three participants from each wave in your inbox (and
other searches). The origins of the feature make sense - in email we’re
used to seeing who an email is from right from our inbox. In one and
two person waves it does kind of make sense, but when you have multiple
participants the icons stop being useful and just become clutter. To me
it adds nothing to my ability to identify a wave and just makes my inbox
“noisy”. The icons in the wave make sense, but I’d like a more thought
out approach to identifying waves. Something like:
Make waves I’ve started a slightly different colour (like sites
where the author’s comments are shaded slightly blue).
Don’t show icons at all in the inbox/searches (or make it easy to
show and hide).
Let me tag or bookmark specific blips within waves and make it
obvious from the inbox which waves have “starred blips”.
Now this post wasn’t started just as a gripe against something I’d like
to see changed - I’d like to hear what things you’d change about wave if
you could. I’m not necessarily talking features we know might come (like
the recently switched
on
“Remove” button). I mean interface and behaviour changes that don’t make
sense to you, or made sense at first, but don’t now you’ve used it a
bit. What are your specific gripes and revolutionary ideas that would
make using Wave more of a delight for you?
Wave is constantly in a state of flux, so there’s every chance the
feature you hate might be altered in future. So get your pet peeves out
here in the comments or on this post’s sister
wave
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Google Wave is a product that’s trying to do something massive to the way we communicate online. Its stated goal is to be what email might look like if it were invented today. A number of other services are labeled as competitors to Google Wave, including the recently updated Google Docs (which is too new for me to comment on in this article), but I wanted to take a look at which of these services are real competition. Below are the services who show the most promise at becoming the next generation of online communication.
Microsoft Sharepoint
Microsoft Sharepoint is a suite of content management tools to maintain and collaborate on documents. While it was never sold as a replacement to email, it was held up as one of the products Google Wave was meant to compete against. But as Steve Gaitten of Bamboo Nation points out, Wave competes with Outlook, not Sharepoint.
It might be possible for Microsoft to transform Outlook in some significant way that expands it beyond email into some sort of super email client. It might even integrate it into Sharepoint a lot further. The truth is, email is Google Wave’s biggest competition. It might be outdated and rough, but it’s the most popular form of communication on the internet. If anything stands a chance at beating Wave, it’s the service that Wave is trying to beat. If email innovation can keep up with user demand, it might just remain the top dog for another 40 years. If Outlook can maintain the large slice of the pie it has, while innovating on top of email it could still be competing into the future.
Novell Pulse
This is exactly the kind of “competition” Google was hoping for when they built Wave. As I’ve said before, Wave’s only hope of replacing email is federation. Only by giving users the choice of Wave provider will users find one that works for them. Novell Pulse might even become a more loved Wave client, and I think that would actually make Google happy. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting a Pulse preview account.
This tool was touted as a Google Wave competitor while in Beta (with the code name 12Sprints or Constellation).
The tool turns out to be a collaboration space for making decisions. It’s not a complete replacement for email, but I’m not sure that was ever their intention. Streamwork allows a team to collaborate and add gadgets to enhance the process.
“It was clear we needed to work together,” Meyer said. “We’re excited about what they’re doing, they’re excited about what we’re doing.” Users will be able to share content between the two platforms, he said. - David Meyer, reported by Computer World
It will be interesting to see what sort of integration they build into it.
Much like Streamwork, these tools are not marketed as email replacements, but were bothtouted as Google Wave competitors. What they do is allow users to collaborate on documents in real-time. If these sorts of services were better integrated into email (perhaps using GMail’s new oAuth tools) they might be more likely candidates. Otherwise they are really only competing with Google Docs and others of that kind.
Products such as ccBetty and the others mentioned enhance email. They exist to remove the holes in email by providing additional information, embedded media, faster searching, or simplified discussion. Some work on GMail, others on Outlook, others work outside any email service by CC-ing a special address onto each email you wish to turn into a discussion. The problem with all of these tools as competition for Wave is that the email protocol just doesn’t take these sorts of tools into consideration, so they’re limited by how many services the developers can write for. That is, each service might support Outlook or GMail, but not all the other smaller players in the marketplace. Where Google Wave has this model beat is by including extension support from day one, allowing developers to enhance Wave in whatever ways they can imagine. Any service that federates with Google Wave will also support these extensions, making it a truly open, extensible experience.
EtherPad
This collaboration tool gets its own special crossed out spot because it was one of the strongest, simplest competitors in the collaboration space, but was bought by Google! The developers have obviously since been put to work on Google Docs, as evidenced by the announcement of the recent update.
Facebook.
This one scares me a little. In some ways, Google Wave is the anti-Facebook. Where Wave is built on open technology, uses an open protocol and federates with other services, Facebook is a “walled garden” and keeps users inside their service. Both systems let developers make extensions and apps that use the platform, and Facebook seems to be slowly inching towards including some of the collaboration features that have been missing so far. Facebook has a huge user base, and could easily become some sort of defacto go-to communication platform for the masses. Currently though there are no obvious moves to open up the platform further, making it unlikely to catch on in business, where email still rules.
Twitter (+ Buzz and other Social Public Messaging)
Currently, none of the services in their current form pose a threat to email - they’re too limited with their 140 character limits and lack of in-line collaboration. But Twitter (or a more open version of it at least) is the product I think has the most real chance of beating Google Wave at becoming the communication platform of the future.
A distributed network (integrated with Twitter of course) that updates in real-time, with an API could have many people needing their email less and less. Once you can get updates from your favourite companies and all your friends are on the service, why would you need it? Throw in an extension or two, enhanced private messaging, and you have a very compelling product that could steal users away from email. The platform is so new, no one really knows where it could go in the future, and I suspect it will give Google Wave and traditional email a run for their money. It could be Twitter, or Buzz, Status.Net or a new player we’ve never heard of, but the idea has the strongest traction of any I’ve seen.
Something completely new
So those are my thoughts about Google Wave’s true competition. Of course, a company could come out of the blue with a product so completely new and exciting it amasses a huge audience that completely abandons email. This is the least likely of all I think, as I’ve stated before I think Wave is our best chance at replacing email wholesale. Alternatively, email will be killed by slow changes to the next generation of social communication. The chances of it happening are dependant on the whims of companies who are trying to make a buck, not replace email so I’m not holding my breath. Email will be replaced by something federated, open, extensible and easy to use. I’ve taken my best shot at predicting what it could be.
What are your thoughts? Is Google Wave our best hope, or is there something even more obvious that could take email’s place?
I get the feeling talking to regular web-folk that Google Wave was a
huge disappointment for them. With the introduction of Buzz,
comments
and
postsflew
asking “will this be better than that Google Wave failure?”
It’s taken me this long to figure out that people are not viewing Google
Wave the way I do. The current technology life cycle goes something like
this:
Readers are on the lookout for new products to try, and better yet -
beta invites to get early exclusive access to the next big thing.
They try the site, decide if it fits in with their day-to-day
activities and if it gives them any benefit over the last shiny new
thing they tried.
They talk it up to their friends to get them to join, as these sites
are almost always no fun without a large number of people you know
and respect.
Then the cycle repeats for all manner of sites and services.
I do this. Every day I pop open Techcrunch,
GigaOm,
ReadWriteWeb, Web Worker
Daily and others to keep informed of the
latest hot places I can claim my name on. I’ve joined
Twitter,
Facebook,
Friendfeed,
Plurk, and others too numerous to
mention all vying to be the place I share my daily activities. It’s
almost addictive to keep on top of the latest sites.
I’m guessing a lot of the people who were itching for Wave invites were,
like I normally would be, expecting Google Wave to deliver something to
replace Facebook or Twitter or Google Docs, or whatever they got in
their heads it would be amazing for. It’s unsurprising that people want
to use the best tools they can for their work (and leisure). The problem
was that Google Wave was never meant to be a replacement for any of
these things. It wasn’t even meant to be a replacement for email - not
just yet anyway.
The best post about this topic came from Daniel Tenner. What problems
does Google Wave
solve? came out
soon after Wave debuted and attempted to explain this disconnect between
what people were expecting and what was actually delivered. It’s an
excellent read, and vital to the understanding of what Google Wave is
meant to be. The short version is: Google is building something that
might be our preferred platform for communication some time in the
future. They’re not expecting it to be an overnight sensation, they just
want people to be aware of it, and start thinking how they can use it to
phase out busted email technology.
At the recent SXSW conference, Louis Gray reported on talks by the GMail
team:
Google Wave, which debuted in early beta last year, is a “leapfrog
project”, which goes beyond today’s environment, but is set to impact
a future Web.
The important thing to keep in your mind here is that Google Wave will
only succeed (over time) if they have a large collection of useful add
ons and competing alternative services that interoperate. They’re
attempting to oust a 30-year-old technology that has morphed and grown
and matured and become one of the vital technologies of the web today.
Everyone uses it, and it’s been shoehorned into all sorts of roles it’s
unsuited for. Google knows that replacing it will not be easy, and they
don’t expect it will happen quickly. They do know it will take a lot of
work from 3rd party developers to give it even a fraction of the rich
ecosystem that email has. So they want to get it right.
So next time you log in to Wave keep that in mind. And if you’re a
developer, give it another shot. You’re our best hope of retiring email
from our lives and giving us real, exciting and useful new technology as
the most ubiquitous communication tool we have.
I believe that people who don’t see what Google Wave is for are simply
looking at it from the wrong angle. Wave is not a social tool. It’s
not Twitter, it’s not GTalk, it’s not Facebook. It was never designed
to appeal to the crowds of geeks who are currently trying it out. Wave
is built for the corporate environment. It’s a tool for getting work
done. And as far as those go, it’s an excellent tool, even at this
very early stage.
This in no way represents a new social networking tool, and I think
using it as such would be rather cumbersome. The beauty of it is, the
user can control the experience and dictate its purpose.
All of this freedom - being able to add to, edit, or delete anyone
else’s blip in any wave - doesn’t just lead to accidental destruction
but concerns about people “putting words into their mouths”, and
raises a number of trust issues for many.
I’m certain that this will not be as big an issue in later iterations of
Wave, and there are already some safeguards in place. Nevertheless, it
is a real issue to watch as Wave matures.
What is amazing is that Google has developed a real-time communication
framework that can work in a federated environment.
People aren’t getting it right now because they’re expecting the beta
to all be about polishing the User Experience. But it’s not about
polishing: it’s about defining.
Can a small startup - made up the two co-founders and one employee
working in a studio apartment in Silicon Valley - go head-to-head with
a powerhouse like Google on something as revolutionary as the
re-invention of e-mail?
If I sound excited, it’s because I am. Google wave has potential to
move way beyond yet another buzz-word for the “new-media crowd”. It
has the chance to grow some real horns and make a big improvement in
the way we develop free software.
The merger of e-mail, instant messaging, and collaborative editing is
overdue. Aside from the inertia of technology, there’s no reason we
should we need different applications - an e-mail client (or site), an
instant messenger, and a collaborative editor - for variations on the
theme of textual communication. I give Google a lot of credit for
kicking off this experiment.
