Thoughts on Google Wave

Lately I received an invitation to Google Wave from a colleague at the otto group (btw, thanks for that, David).

First I thought, that Wave is another way of spending my precious time. Some people say, that Google just tries to revolutionize the communication tool market with its Google Wave application and are curios if that will work given the set of existing communication tools with their broad feature set. Beside that some point out that the feature of adding arbitrary content at any location within a wave could discourage non-digital natives from using the new technology.

I fully agree that Google tries again to revolutionize a market, but I disagree with the implicated estimation that Google just adds another communication tool. Although Wave is still in beta mode, it is already visible what the driving force behind the scene is. Google does not provide us with another isolated publishing pipe like Twitter or alike but enhances our way of information exchange by combining different communication channels into an integrated application.

From my point of view, one of the main problems with today's communication tools is the fact that some of them are very famous but none of them really maps the real life way of conversation into the digital world. That again leaves us with sometimes fragmented conversations that are unnecessarily protracted because the exchanged textual informations (for the case of an email) do not fully explain the intentions of the participants. In real life we tend to support such situations with additional material from different sources, eg. maps or photos, to clarify our statements.

Google actually tries to solve what I expressed in my last statement: support a conversation with information from a variety of sources. Make no mistake about the hype Google created around Wave, the application is still under development and has more the feeling of a very active research project than an enterprise enabled communication tool. But if you strip down the initial character of its current state (by 17/12/2009) you must realize that Google heralds a new era of compelling messaging experience as for example Mozilla also tries do achieve with its Raindrop project.

Finally neither the Google nor the Mozilla approach will help us today to avoid the face-off with situations like Frank Schirrmacher wrote about: he complained that his head cannot follow the constant flow of information anymore (see www.spiegel.de, german only). But on the other hand they help us to steer into the right direction. A very tiny but important step is the traceability of a Waves conversation history which does not only help the non-digital natives to find out when a certain piece of information was inserted into a conversation and by whom.