Google Wave is a new online communications tool that enables groups of people to edit and discuss documents simultaneously on the web. The Google Wave team says Wave is "what email would look like if it were invented today." [1] However, because Wave is mostly a document collaboration tool, the oversimplified email metaphor can mislead new users. The initial Wave experience can feel chaotic and confusing, but use cases for Wave abound. Come on in and meet Wave.
Modernizing Email
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.
Email's Problems
Email is simple, wildly popular, and works well—or else it wouldn't have stayed in such widespread use as long as it has. But email has serious drawbacks when using it to manage a conversation within a group.
- Email propagates multiple copies and versions of messages. As soon as email is sent, the message's contents are locked in. It can only be copied, pasted, and sent on. For example, Kaylee types an email message, addresses it to Zoe, and sends it. A copy of that message stays in Kaylee's sent box, and another copy appears in Zoe's inbox. Zoe replies and optionally includes a copy of the original message in her response. A copy stays in her sent box, and yet another copy appears in Kaylee's inbox. Kaylee replies to Zoe's reply, cc's: Wash, and sends it. The Send button gets pushed only three times, yet seven copies of the same message appear in differing states for three people—each of them a dead, lifeless version of another. Email propagates copies of copies, storing each in a rudimentary filing system of "boxes." Email was designed as a system of notification, not collaboration. Given that email was designed to imitate "snail mail"—where the ultimate destination was either the circular file or a filing cabinet—letters sent via email seemed destined for cold storage, not the cauldron of innovative workspaces.
- You can't embed rich content like maps, photo slide shows, or video clips in the body of an email. Email's answer for anything that's not text is "The Attachment." Whether it's a document, a photo, a video, a group survey, or a web page, email wasn't designed to incorporate interactivity or richness within the body of the message itself. You can include a link to a web page inside email, but sometimes those break or become unclickable, and they force the recipient out of your email and into a browser. While some email clients like Gmail or Microsoft Outlook can display rich message formatting with images and colors, or display attached files inline, there's no consistency. No one's email always looks the same.
- To reply to a subsection of an email, you have to quote that section manually. Kaylee sends Wash an email telling him about the engine upgrade project she's working on, then asks where the nearest place to stop for parts is, and how long it will take to get there. An email message is just a flat document, so it's not easy for Wash to respond to each question Kaylee has asked in a readable order. He could reply to her message and manually copy and paste just her questions and position his answers directly after them. But that's a lot of work—and most people don't do it. Often questions and individual points that need addressing via email get lost because there's no easy way to reply to a specific section of a message.
- It's not easy to privately respond to specific people within a group email. When the group finally does stop for parts, Badger emails them asking for a cargo drop-off. Zoe wants to ask the crew how they should negotiate payment. She can't reply to all because Badger will see it, so she has to manually edit the recipient list on the private email and create yet another copy of the message.
Since email's invention in the 1960s, the internet and then the World Wide Web was born, which gave everyone an instant electronic printing press. In the early days, web sites were just static documents that didn't change. As the web grew and the technology behind it progressed, web sites became interactive, ever-changing hosted applications, where you could store and update information, communicate with others, chat in real-time, and even check and send email. In a world where broadband is widely available and you can use blogs, Wikipedia, instant messenger, and hosted web applications that obviate the need for any software on your computer besides a web browser, email looks even more ancient.
While in practice Google Wave isn't a direct replacement for email, understanding email's problems given the capabilities of the modern web is a good starter framework for understanding what Google Wave can do.
Wave's Solution: Conversations as Live Documents
Rather than pass back and forth multiple copies of messages, Google Wave hosts a single copy of a conversation that all participants can edit and add to. Wave displays the latest version of the conversation to everyone in the group in real-time, even as it's changing. That means if Jack has the wave he sent Jill open on his computer in California, and Jill is typing her responses in New York, Jack sees the wave change keystroke by keystroke.
Google Wave treats an email conversation with multiple recipients and senders as a document with multiple editors and writers. If you can make the conversations-as-documents and documents-as-conversations leap along with Wave, the system makes 100% more sense.
In other, smaller ways, Google Wave addresses the rest of the problems with email listed above. Using Google Wave, all the participants in a conversation have the ability to:
- Reply to a subset of a wave inline
- Add rich interactive media like videos, images, maps, and polls in-wave
- Play back and copy earlier versions of a wave, so that you can revert to an older state of a given wave, or see how it changed over time
In theory, Wave is a big upgrade to email and document collaboration tools. The following table sums up the difference between "The Email Way" and "The Wave Way."
| The Email Way | The Wave Way | |
|---|---|---|
| People | Sender or Recipient | Participant |
| Messages | Copies | Single, hosted conversation |
| Rich Content | Attachments | Inline gadgets |
| Quoting/commenting | Manual | Forum-like threading |
| Privacy | CC, BCC | Inline, private threads |
Wave sounds great in theory, right? In practice, Wave introduces complexities that put off new users.
No comments:
Post a Comment