Your Thoughts on Google Wave

[Mark Greenfield]

With the recent announcement about Google Wave, I'm interested in knowing your thoughts on the impact Wave will have on communications in general and on higher ed communications in particular.

Here is a link to the video announcing Google Wave. It's over an hour long, but does provide good insight into the many possiblities for this platform.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

So what do you think? Will this be a game changer? (IMHO - I think it will definitely rewrite the rules.)

[Steve]

I think it ultimately depends on adoption here. If we can get our coworkers into the platform, it can replace a lot of collaboration tools and make business life more effective within our office. The biggest missing piece on this from what I saw was calendar integration, but I'm sure they're working on that.

Too, I think the ability to embed a Wave in other tools, like a blog, will allow us to improve those services if we choose. I think a lot of our work in the future will amount to pulling various pieces of various services from various providers together to create our own Web applications to solve our problems at hand ... so Wave becomes another tool in that toolbox.

[Mike Henderson]

I'm sure the calendar integration could be written in 10min using the Quick Add. You can see how they easily added the Google Map widget, it is pretty much the same api.

I can't wait for the collaboration it will bring to the department. It seems everyday I am sending email to the entire department (5 of us) for links and feedback. I have tried to get delicious set up for everyone, but people are slow to adapt it.

I've signed up for a developer preview, but trying to figure out how it can be implemented to be a great tool in the highered area. Possibly real time communication with admissions people, Q&A sessions? I think some folks are doing this already with live chats? With the functionality of playback, students will be able to keep up with the conversation.

I'm really excited for the embed functionality. Will help me get jump started with a blog. I could just collect random thoughts and aggregate them to make blog posts.

[Matt Dana]

I'm excited for it. We don't have a real intranet set up here, which means we've got a great opportunity to build a really cool one from scratch using Wave.

[Robert Holbach]

I like it - but I'm sceptical about how universally accepted it will be, and how quickly it will grow. I posted a comment elsewhere, which I am reposting here:

I'm not convinced it'll become mainstream for at least five years, probably a decade. There is simply too much inertia in email and discussion boards as separate things. Why? Because it doesn't offer something fundamental. It is too complicated to explain the advantages, too much effort for lazy people to unlearn email and learn this...

If it is 100% compatible with emails (which does not appear to be the case), then it might stand a chance to grow quickly. If it isn't, then it is a shiny concept toy which will probably struggle to gain popularity outside the tech community. Alternatively, it might become popular in social networks (growing from Orkut) and social environments, but take a long while to make it into widespread business use.

It also has the potential to become quite overwhelming. Looking at it one wave at a time highlights the strengths. Imagining 25 or 50 or even 100 unread waves in an inbox (in-ocean?) is much less pleasant. If waves are indeed the future, then occupational health / psychologists will undoubtedly start defining a new condition - perhaps "virtual tsunami syndrome" or similar.

In the end, email is so successful because it is a very simple thing. A message, a letter, a memo - it has a clear equivalent in history and ancient past, and while Romans would undoubtedly have taken some time getting used to QWERTY keyboards, they would probably have understood the purpose and function of email quickly enough. A wave is a complex thing. There was nothing remotely comparable to waves 100 years ago. Even today, with Facebook and wikis etc, a wave is still futuristic conceptually - a (small) step in mental evolution ahead of most "digital immigrants". That tells me it'll either be a niche thing once launched, or it will take a generation to become universal.