GOOGLE WAVE: IS IT WORTH THE RIDE?

The Millennial generation seems to be embracing Google’s new tool called the Wave, while the X’er and Boomer generations seem to be waiting to see how the new tool works. Google Wave is like Instant Messenger on steroids.

 

The confusion about how to label the tool may be behind a lot of the negative hype and disappointment of early beta users. So why should you be excited? Simply put: Google Wave is a collaboration tool that eliminates many of the classic challenges of email threads. 

So what’s the problem with email, aside from spam? It’s an awkward tool for collaboration and yet, so many of us use it for that.

True, there are a number of popular collaboration solutions that many on the development team may use—Google Docs, Etherpad, Skitch, screen sharing tools or any number of collaborative white board applications. And the problem for this group is that they may have signed up for so many services they get inundated with notifications, monthly newsletters, automated messages.

But what about the communications you engage in with others in your corporate environment--collaboration happens there all the time. People work on documents and presentations. They have lengthy discussions on email, pieces of work bounce back and forth across one or multiple departments for weeks before they are finished. And in the process, people are added to the discussions, attachments get lost, inboxes fill up and emails bounce. We’ve all experienced the pain of misunderstood messages, multiple versioning, etc.

So let’s look at what Wave does to address some common collaboration challenges:

#1: Collaborating on a piece of text
Collaborating on a document, that later needs to be sent out, is usually done in Microsoft Word with Track Changes turned on, or on the fly as a long thread on email with changes coming in from every direction. It’s a nightmare to keep track of and collate all that feedback. Even giving the feedback is difficult: sometimes you have to quote the context and make sure your change is clearly understood.

Google Wave integrates Etherpad’s features into the email client, so putting an important email together with feedback from the team becomes easier. You can view all the comments, or waves, from one location and comments are easily collapsible and dock themselves in the upper part of your screen. You can reply to an entire wave like an IM or an email by clicking the reply button on a wave’s toolbar. What’s cool for many is the ability to reply to bits of a message inline, so you and your collaborators annotate the wave as you go, in real-time.

Challenge #2: Adding new people to a conversation
With a typical email thread, you can forward the whole thread to a new participant or add them to the next reply, but they will only get a garbled, over-indented mess in reverse chronological order.

Wave gives exactly the same view to everyone, regardless of when they have been added. Anyone can use the Wave Revision Playback feature to see how the dialogue was constructed over time—think of it as a slideshow through Wikipedia page revisions.

Challenge #3: Keeping people added to the conversation
How many times have you added people only to have them dropped again when someone replies to an earlier message and didn’t realize the recipients list had changed? It can take awhile to realize key people have been left out of the conversation and it costs time and hassle for all concerned.

Wave solves this one by making “dropping people” an explicit action, instead of something you can do by mistake.

Challenge #4: Attaching files
Most large companies limit attachment file size or the size of people’s mailboxes because of email storage concerns. The result can be “Inbox full” bounces when sending large documents around. Sending documents can be iffy at best as SMTP protocol doesn’t seem to be all that good at sending large files.

Google Wave is made to attach large documents and all sorts of rich content to your wave—like a YouTube video, Google Map, images, links or anything a Gadget enables. Plus Wave has an ever-growing gallery of wave extensions--Gadgets (rich content) and Robots (perform some action) that you can add to your wave.

An example is the Ribbit conference gadget. Add it to a wave and everyone adds their phone number to it. Click the “Start Conference” button and everyone’s phone rings--and you’re on the phone, while you collaborate and wave.

Challenge #5: Lost attachments
When you reply to an email with an attachment, the attachment is dropped. What this means is that when you add new people as recipients, or by forwarding them the latest email, they won’t get any of the previous attachments. The task of going back through possibly weeks of emails in your inbox, to find that first attachment or other key documents, to share with newcomers to get them up to speed, can be time consuming.

With Wave’s model, the attachments stay in one place, where you put them. You never need to re-forward an attachment to anyone and when new people enter the conversation they can access all the attachments immediately.

Challenge #6: Multiple conversation branches
Email conversations are, basically, flat; if you try to have multiple branches of conversation in email you end up with a mess. Once experienced, you usually try to avoid multiple branches of conversation in the future. But flattening everything results in limitations—every email ends up containing replies to several other emails and it becomes difficult to track what was replied to and what was not. It’s also hard to collate all suggestions effectively and efficiently.

Google Wave resolves this challenge by allowing clear, obvious threading, which is expandable and collapsible, can be made private and public, and updates in real time—you can even watch the keystrokes as contributors are typing.

Challenge #7: Small corrections
With email, if someone’s only comment is to correct a handful of typos, it can require almost as much work as making major revisions. You need to quote the context, highlight which bit you corrected, and then rely on the other person to apply changes back to the original document—which can often be forgotten.

With Wave, you can edit the original text and make those changes. If anyone wants to review your changes, they can play them back with Wave Revision Playback.

Challenge #8: Email to IM to Email
Instant Messenger is a useful technology for some that has proven its worth. But it’s not very integrated with email.

What Google Wave does is realize that a lot of IM conversations begin with an email exchange that just gets too rapid. When you send more than 3 emails to the same person in one minute, it usually makes sense to pick up the phone or IM them. With Google Wave, this decision does not need to be a conscious decision: if you are replying quickly, Wave smoothly turns into an IM-like platform. When your replies get slower again, Wave smoothly turns back into an email-like platform.

This means the whole conversation, whether email-like or IM-like, is tracked and searchable in the same place, and visible to all those invited to the conversation.

Google calls Wave an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. It was built for the corporate environment. It’s a tool intended to get work done more effectively and efficiently. Since it’s a beta tool, likely it will take a few iterations for the tool to incorporate features that make adoption as common place as GMAIL or Google Docs. But if you haven’t caught the Google Wave and have a need for collaboration, we recommend you examine the tool for your use.

If you’d like more detail on how Wave works, here’s a detailed review with some screenshots.

 

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