Google Wave: The Revolution in Communication

(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.

Google Calendar + Evolution = One-Way Destination to Fast Calendars

I’m putting more stuff on my calendar now to try and keep my life much more organized. The Pandora will be perfect as a mobile PIM device, amongue other things, allowing me to view and edit my calendar on the go. When I’m sitting in front of my computer, though, it’s hard to work up the momentum to open Firefox and browse over to Google Calendar.