(I was so excited when I watched the Google Wave video that I had to write this while I watched. That’ll explain the overload of optimism and excitement.)
Google seems to do all the obvious things: make free e-mail with an excellent spam filter, take the existing phone system and digitize it a little, make an online word processor and collaboration, and provide a really nice search engine.
This year, Google is doing it again. Two engineers in Google’s forces stepped back and examined the world of communication we’ve built. We all know that e-mail is ancient and inefficient, and they knew that too. So, they decided to completely reinvent the entire communication system.
It’s called Google Wave. It’s really simple.
Instead of thinking of communication as messages that are literally shoved around from place to place, Google Wave thinks of messages as being part of a conversation, which doesn’t move anywhere. Rather, a conversation between two (or more!) people occurs in a single, shared location.
Messages can be very long or very short. You can send long paragraphs of text in an e-mail format, or you can communicate back and forth in a texting-like format. There is no limits to what you can do with these messages. Continue reading