I’ll try to keep that cheesy pun my last.
I had been anticipating the launch of Google’s new Wave product for some time; I have now had an account for a few months and I have to say I was slightly disappointed. Knowing what to expect, I’d sat through the full 1:32 video from the I/O conference and loved it. But after using it with the small number of my friends who were lucky enough to get an invite also, it has proved itself as an advanced chatting client, not the life changing email smashing concept I thought it was going to be (but i had some pretty high hopes). That being said there is some validity to Wave for small business, remote employees, and everyday users. Google Wave offers real-time(!!!), and it’s hard to express how legitimate the live, zero delay communication and collaboration this really is. The collaboration benefit to drafting documents, emails, proposals, etc. is endless with the ability to add users as the wave continues, letting them see the progression in a “playback” feature, making it easy to get caught up – altogether it is, and will be, a great advancement in the way we work. Standard email systems like Outlook fragment email strings into separate emails and can make it difficult to maintain a coherent conversational flow with multiple CC’s FWD’s Replys Replay Alls ect. (you get the point we’ve all hit this annoyance), and Gmail advanced this with “conversational” email stacking. Wave took a look at email that was developed back in the 70′s and hasn’t seen significant conceptual changes in 40+ years, then developed a tool that would be today’s email, if we were starting from scratch now. Email wasn’t designed for what it’s evolved into, and Wave is the start of the change. I’ll be the first to admit we’re not going to say goodbye to the friendly “@” symbol anytime soon, however we might see a dramatic evolution in the way electronic communication is thought of.
Another great feature of Google Wave that will also benefit the small business owners is the ability to maintain multiple blogs and Twitter accounts from one place. There are tools that do this already but it’s ANOTHER account you need whereas with Google Wave it’s already part of your Google experience. Once Google Wave is available to everyone, I’m confident some of my concerns and reluctance to call it, “the replacement for email,” will be ironed out.
And for those who want to want an invite, let me know! I’ll be giving them away to the first eight people to follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our blog.
[cmisak] [at] [adcuda] [dot] [com]
