Wave power
2009-05-29 10:47
Google unveiled their latest project yesterday, the somewhat ominously named Google Wave.
Now before all you surfer dudes get excited, it's not going to let you Google "6 foot swell Jeffries". Instead it's an attempt to revolutionise the way we communicate online.
The idea is to combine the best features of e-mail, instant messaging, blogging and collaborative formats (like wikis) into a single "wave" of communication.
A user starts a conversation (or "wave") with someone, like starting a chat or sending an e-mail. The other person can respond either instantly or later, and both of them can add other people to the conversation.
All the people in a conversation can simultaneously add text, pictures, videos, sound and links to the conversation and - here's the kicker - they can also simultaneously edit any part of conversation. Then, at any point you can "replay" a conversation to see how it grew and who added and edited what.
A wave can evolve over seconds or over weeks - so in theory it is useful for everything from arranging a night out with friends to collaborating on a yearly marketing plan with your Australian business partner.
Natural divides
Wave is a passion project by Lars and Jens Rasmussen - the super-smart brothers who brought the world Google Maps. That product changed the game in online mapping, and they must be fairly confident Wave will do the same for communication.
What bothers me is that the Rasmussens tacitly assume our current communication paradigm is fundamentally broken, or at least needs drastic improvement.
In their blog post about Wave, Lars asks "Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication - e-mail versus chat, or conversations versus documents?" He complains that e-mail and instant messaging ape real world equivalents (post and the telephone) and that communication has moved on since then.
While there may be some truth in the idea that the divides between mediums are somewhat artificial, they also perfectly natural. Human beings are inherently comfortable with different paces of communication, and use them for different purposes.
How many times have you sent an angry e-mail rather than confront someone on the telephone? And do you really want your annoying colleague to be able to edit your carefully worded e-mail ten seconds after you have sent it? And who, exactly, thinks chatting to the CEO via instant messaging is a universally good idea?
The Rasmussen's are missing two points here. Firstly the telephone and snail mail aren't simply outdated "technology platforms" - they work because they fit into our natural human patterns of interaction. If they did not, they would have been discarded. So e-mail didn't copy snail mail so much as make it cheaper and more efficient. Essentially the technology fits the people, not the other way around.
Secondly, they assume that because their technology is so much more powerful and feature rich that people will automatically gravitate towards it. Human beings, notoriously, are much slower to change than technology and will stubbornly cling to old comfortable standards long after they should have been replaced.
Let's look at another Google product as an example: the excellent Google Docs. This service gives you features that are substantially similar to Microsoft's Word, but instead of costing you hundreds of dollars it's completely free. What's more you can collaboratively edit, in real time, any document (sound familiar?).
Unfair criticism
So has the whole world moved to Google Docs? Nope. Most of us are still feathering Bill Gate's nest, or using free software like Open Office which lack most of the collaboration features that Google offers.
And besides, the real-time-shared-conversation game is already dominated by Twitter, whose service in many ways resembles a stripped down version of what Wave is trying to achieve. But instead of starting simple, as Twitter have done, Google have opted to go feature crazy. I'm just not sure I need the choice to add sound, videos and geo-tags to my every thought and feeling.
I'm being quite unfair in my criticism - the Rasmussen's are in fact quite humble about the project and haven't labelled it a game changer at all. And in practice their model may just prove successful. We'll have to wait a few months for the launch to see for sure.
But whether or not Wave succeeds, its birth says more about where the web is going than the product in particular. We've gotten so used to thinking of the web as a kind of fancy electronic magazine - now it's becoming a giant global cocktail party - and everyone's invited.
Send your comments to Alistair
Disclaimer: News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.
- News24