Google is re-inventing email
On September 30th, Google sent out 100,000 invites to some very lucky people. With this invite you may sign up for Google Wave. To quote Google; “Wave is what email would have been if it had been invented in the 21st century rather than the 1970′s.”
Email is like traditional mail (snail mail). Each email message is in its own package (envelope). Emails are not linked together into a conversation but rather are read and sent one at a time. Some modern email programs and some email websites like Gmail try to link all the messages together so you can see an entire conversation, but in actuality each email message is still completely separate and this is just an attempt to work around the problem. With traditional email, a conversation with multiple people can have everyone sending their responses at different times in response to different messages so it can get messy. You can reply to a message that has already been settled because you haven’t read the emails sent after the one you are currently replying to. As a result, long conversations between several people can become very confusing.
“Wave” changes the structure of the email process. A Wave is more like a discussion. Everyone’s responses are tied together so you can see and read through the entire conversation before replying. You are less likely to miss anything and your responses keep up to the current conversation. Also, in a Wave you can reply to any part of a conversation.
Imagine this. I send an email to you saying “Hey, why don’t we meet at the waterfront at 3 tomorrow morning?” Realizing my mistake, I would have to send another email after saying, “oops, I meant 8!” In the mean time sometime could respond with; “What? 3am?” This is not the case with a Wave. You can edit your Waves after you send them, but be warned, the edit history is saved. If you sent all your co-workers a Wave one night calling your boss a moron, you can go back and edit it, but people can still look at the whole conversation, including the changes. You can also un-send a Wave, however. If you realize you “misspoke” you can remove all the recipients from the message. If you do this before they’ve checked their Waves, no one will know that you called your boss a moron, which really isn’t conducive to steady employment.
Because a Wave shows the conversation as a whole rather than in separate emails, there is no longer a need to quote the old email message underneath your response, often in reverse order, which is difficult to follow.
Wave is like Facebook messages. You can see all the messages in one place, unlike email or text messaging where you can only see the most recent messages grouped together. What’s really cool is that it also has sub-threads. If one conversation becomes two conversations they can go in separate directions without interfering with each other. So one part of the wave will be talking about what movie to watch, but another part will be talking about which day to watch the movie, rather than it all being jumbled together.
You can even add a voting gadget (tool) that allows everyone to vote on which movie they want to see or a map gadget to show the address of a restaurant or an RSVP gadget everyone can indicate if they want to come or not.
You can add and remove people that are in the conversation whenever you like. With Facebook you are stuck with the people added at the start and you are stuck with only those people.
As well as conversations, you can also play games with other people in a Wave. For example, you can insert a Suduko, Chess or Checkers in a Wave and play together.
You can also drag and drop a file into a Wave so the participants can download it.
Wave is a bold re-imagining of what email should be. Google hopes that Wave will completely remove email from the internet. Wave could change the way we communicate or it could become just another failed product. Time will tell, but it will be an interesting time.