Google Wave: “what might email look like if we invented it today”
What do you do five years after shaking things up with Google Maps. If you are Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the core developers behind Google Maps, you apply yourself to a different way of thinking about collaboration and communication over the Internet.
Spend an hour and a quarter watching Lars, Jens and their project manager Stephanie Hannon and their crew on Youtube from the June Google I/O conference. Its hard not to start thinking, I could use this thing in my work and when can I try it out.
Background. Email has been around for almost forty years, starting out before the web and the Internet as we know it now. Today, we often have a love/hate relationship with our Inbox. In just the last couple years, whole new realms of team communication, web-base collaboration and social networking sharing have grown up as alternatives to “pure” email.
Problem is, unless you can effectively live on line in one or two of these collaborative cloud worlds, you often still depend on email. And if not email, then other things that push new information out to me to alert me to go back and look. I use Basecamp every day to organize discussion about the projects I’m involved in. I depend on it sending messages by email or feeding reminders into my calendar. If you work with a team using a Google document, a Gliffy process diagram, or a Slideshare presentation, you need to have it send an email to let everyone else know. It's cool that in MS Office 2007 – and now in Open Office 3.1—you can not only “track changes,” but also share comments with other editors. You still have to send the new version out and wait for a response.
Some things get a bit closer to real time collaboration. In a Google doc, you can be on a conference call and all take notes in the same document. Kind of crazy distracting at first, but really useful once you get used to it.
I mentioned dropbox in a recent blog, and now have been playing around with drop.io as well. These give let you share a folder either among your own various computers or else with a team. But you might not notice an update of your team’s collaborative materials unless someone tells you. Email, text, phone, IM, maybe Twitter or private micro blog environments still are needed to complete the communication loop.
Google Wave wants to change that. In the first place, it combines some of the best elements of Gmail, Instant Messaging, and Google Docs. An email becomes a Wave, an organized and organizing conversation. Instead of message and response, you can just respond by editing within the message, so a message becomes a Google Doc. You can discuss points within it by inserting an IM-like discussion at one or another points in the message. Or a poll, or other interactive feature.
So, if four of you want to draw lessons from yesterday’s workshop and blog about it, what can you do? Start a wave with your notes. Others can now edit it real time. And real time will mean seeing everyone’s contributions appear character by character. To broaden the discussion, you don’t forward an email, you just add them to the Wave, and they can use the playback feature to see everyone’s contributions as they came in.
Drag and drop photos from the event and the Wave will automatically have an embedded photo gallery everyone can tag, label or add to. Other one click tools allow you to add links or embed youtube or other external objects.
The line between an email discussion and a collaborative document has gotten a lot narrower. Instead of debate over whether email is dead, Google Wave aims to remake it into what it ought to be today.
Using the Wave API, once your team is far enough along with your summary of yesterday’s event, you can embed it in a blog post or insert into a social media page (much as with a Google map today). As the Wave gets further refined, it will be updated real time on that external page. Extensions based on the API will do simultaneous translation, so if I’m seeing the Wave in English, a team member in Mexico might see it in Spanish. The context sensitive spell checker fixed “icland is an icland” to become: “Iceland is an island.”
Usable versions of this seem months away. Maybe Google figured they would preview so much of it so early because they wanted to get developer attention as early as possible. Other things that will improve options available to collaborative teams also seem in the works. For example, Drupal 7, also due to begin appearing end of this year, also will have some amazing steps forward in collaboration and process integration. Discussion in Drupal circles has already begun, Drupal 7 versus Wave, or Drupal 7 PLUS Wave.
Like other cloud based collaboration initiatives, Wave poses privacy concerns. It will be easy, but will it be as secure as, say, a Drupal 7 collaborative site? One very exciting aspect of the Google Wave model, is that in addition to having the usual rich open environment for developers, the whole project will be Open Source. You will be able to create your own private label Wave site, and presumably ensure the privacy levels appropriate to your work and audience. Now, that seems different for Google.
How important is all this stuff? The collaborative tools we all use today make a huge difference in the creativity, practicality and effectiveness of all kinds of projects today. In its June 15 issue, even as the Business Week cover story bemoaned the slowing down of innovation in the United States, it also highlighted “Cloud Computing’s Big Bang for Business.” Google Wave will be a big part of this by this time next year. Watch the video, then sign up and check it out at http://wave.google.com.
Spend an hour and a quarter watching Lars, Jens and their project manager Stephanie Hannon and their crew on Youtube from the June Google I/O conference. Its hard not to start thinking, I could use this thing in my work and when can I try it out.
Background. Email has been around for almost forty years, starting out before the web and the Internet as we know it now. Today, we often have a love/hate relationship with our Inbox. In just the last couple years, whole new realms of team communication, web-base collaboration and social networking sharing have grown up as alternatives to “pure” email.
Problem is, unless you can effectively live on line in one or two of these collaborative cloud worlds, you often still depend on email. And if not email, then other things that push new information out to me to alert me to go back and look. I use Basecamp every day to organize discussion about the projects I’m involved in. I depend on it sending messages by email or feeding reminders into my calendar. If you work with a team using a Google document, a Gliffy process diagram, or a Slideshare presentation, you need to have it send an email to let everyone else know. It's cool that in MS Office 2007 – and now in Open Office 3.1—you can not only “track changes,” but also share comments with other editors. You still have to send the new version out and wait for a response.
Some things get a bit closer to real time collaboration. In a Google doc, you can be on a conference call and all take notes in the same document. Kind of crazy distracting at first, but really useful once you get used to it.
I mentioned dropbox in a recent blog, and now have been playing around with drop.io as well. These give let you share a folder either among your own various computers or else with a team. But you might not notice an update of your team’s collaborative materials unless someone tells you. Email, text, phone, IM, maybe Twitter or private micro blog environments still are needed to complete the communication loop.
Google Wave wants to change that. In the first place, it combines some of the best elements of Gmail, Instant Messaging, and Google Docs. An email becomes a Wave, an organized and organizing conversation. Instead of message and response, you can just respond by editing within the message, so a message becomes a Google Doc. You can discuss points within it by inserting an IM-like discussion at one or another points in the message. Or a poll, or other interactive feature.
So, if four of you want to draw lessons from yesterday’s workshop and blog about it, what can you do? Start a wave with your notes. Others can now edit it real time. And real time will mean seeing everyone’s contributions appear character by character. To broaden the discussion, you don’t forward an email, you just add them to the Wave, and they can use the playback feature to see everyone’s contributions as they came in.
Drag and drop photos from the event and the Wave will automatically have an embedded photo gallery everyone can tag, label or add to. Other one click tools allow you to add links or embed youtube or other external objects.
The line between an email discussion and a collaborative document has gotten a lot narrower. Instead of debate over whether email is dead, Google Wave aims to remake it into what it ought to be today.
Using the Wave API, once your team is far enough along with your summary of yesterday’s event, you can embed it in a blog post or insert into a social media page (much as with a Google map today). As the Wave gets further refined, it will be updated real time on that external page. Extensions based on the API will do simultaneous translation, so if I’m seeing the Wave in English, a team member in Mexico might see it in Spanish. The context sensitive spell checker fixed “icland is an icland” to become: “Iceland is an island.”
Usable versions of this seem months away. Maybe Google figured they would preview so much of it so early because they wanted to get developer attention as early as possible. Other things that will improve options available to collaborative teams also seem in the works. For example, Drupal 7, also due to begin appearing end of this year, also will have some amazing steps forward in collaboration and process integration. Discussion in Drupal circles has already begun, Drupal 7 versus Wave, or Drupal 7 PLUS Wave.
Like other cloud based collaboration initiatives, Wave poses privacy concerns. It will be easy, but will it be as secure as, say, a Drupal 7 collaborative site? One very exciting aspect of the Google Wave model, is that in addition to having the usual rich open environment for developers, the whole project will be Open Source. You will be able to create your own private label Wave site, and presumably ensure the privacy levels appropriate to your work and audience. Now, that seems different for Google.
How important is all this stuff? The collaborative tools we all use today make a huge difference in the creativity, practicality and effectiveness of all kinds of projects today. In its June 15 issue, even as the Business Week cover story bemoaned the slowing down of innovation in the United States, it also highlighted “Cloud Computing’s Big Bang for Business.” Google Wave will be a big part of this by this time next year. Watch the video, then sign up and check it out at http://wave.google.com.
Labels: collaboration, education, email, Google
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