Experience Matters

Google Wave: Anthropology in Overdrive

The Google team behind Maps, in an attempt to conjure a similar breath of fresh air in the way we communicate, announced last week its development of Google Wave. With an online communications tool that purports to combine e-mail, blogs, instant messaging, and wikis, they’re well on their way. (Google Wave’s launch date is as yet unannounced.)

In my mind, the most significant innovation of Google Wave is its treatment of a communication thread – instead of being sent around as a permanent entity, a thread (now a “wave”), becomes a living, nearly breathing resource.

Imagine a message you’d written to several coworkers about a project, with details that weren’t altogether fleshed out. With Google Wave, your coworkers would get your wave, add their questions (which you’d then see) and would notice edits you make to include project details as they develop. Everyone sees and refreshes the same hosted document.

Google Wave highlights include:

· Real-time typing option, which makes each wave a potential venue for instant messaging, with – allow me to repeat – real-time typing (Time to polish your keyboard prowess.)

· Private messaging, so that certain parties can only see select parts of your wave

· Live interaction with Wave extensions, like a “Yes/No” RSVP gadget, polls, and, sure – maybe a game or two (Developers, start   your engines!)

· “Playback” allows a wave’s newcomers to get up-to-date on the conversation

· The mother of all spell-checking, which uses the data among billions of pages on the web to determine the best word for each context

· Real-time translation, using Google’s translation system, based on statistical language-usage data

· Google Waves can be embedded in other web services, like blogs and photo-sharing, to encourage Wave’s seamless collaboration web-wide

· Google Wave is actually an open platform, so that anyone who has an idea to extend its functionality can do so, to everyone’s benefit

It’s almost as if the Google Wave team is made of anthropologists in overdrive, imagining what our digital correspondence will look like hundreds of years from now, and finding that the only somewhat novel use of e-mail forwarding was adding your name to bottom of a long list of Petitioners Against the Issue of the Day or on a recipe-club chain letter; Admitting that so much of our lives, at work and at play, depends on an e-mail thread; Realizing that, in the pure light of day, e-mail threads are ugly. Thanks to the Wave team, we won’t look like total morons to those who are digging up our digital antiquities. We have a new future, free of e-mail threads. Free of:

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And that’s something to celebrate.