There has been a lot written about Google Wave and here is yet more that I am cross posting from FastForward to get your reaction. Miguel Helft provided a nice overview, Google Showcases New Communication and Collaboration Tool. David Coursey asked, is Google Wave a Twitter Killer? and Dion Hinchcliffe discussed, the enterprise implications of Google Wave. John Moore wrote about how Google Wave could be a great CRM for the small to mid size business market and I am sure many other applications built on top of Google Wave will follow.
Paula Thornton, my fellow FastForward blogger, urged me to watch the long Google Wave video demonstration (hour+) of Google Wave and we discussed where Wave might go. I finally had a chance to do this and wanted to share my notes and impressions. Paula looked at a draft of this post and gave me comments but I take responsibility for any remaining short comings.
Lars Rasmussen was the master of ceremonies and introduced Google Wave as a communication and collaboration tool. It is Open Source with robust APIs, and built leveraging the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). They introduced it at a developer’s conference to encourage others to build apps on top of Wave. I would agree here. I think that Wave has great potential but its potential will be best realized through focused applications that sit on top of its very open structure. Most people like more than a blank slate, even a very robust one that does things not done before. More on this later.
Lars said that email was invented 40 years ago, before the Web. They wanted to create email as if it was a new thing today with the Web in mind. I can see this in what they did. As Lars said, email was created to work like “old school” mail. You send mail and you receive mail and you send more mail back. With Google Wave you work in the same space and just keep editing the same content if you want or interjecting comments anywhere in the content. It is much more collaborative and conversational --- it takes greater advantage of what the Web can do.
You can also drag and drop stuff such as pictures from your desktop anywhere into the conversation that is happening in a Wave. Things are no longer sequential. However, if you want to see the sequence of how the conversation got built you can use the Playback feature to get a “movie” of the construction of the conversation.
This is transformative, similar to the transition from typewriters to word processing changed writing except more so. With Wave you see the new content emerging as it is typed simultaneously on all computer screens that are tuned into the Wave. There is no sending back and forth, it just ‘is’. There is no ‘there’ -- just a global ‘here’. There is no linear transactional and temporal exchange between individuals, it’s all ‘now’. They even showed four people editing the same document at the same time. This might get chaotic. You can set privacy levels so you decide which people see the new content emerging.
Lars discussed ways to organize Waves. I think this will be important. In my view that was a flaw in del.icio.us and is a potential issue with Twitter, What do you do as you start to create massive amounts of content? That was a problem for me with del.icio.us and is starting to be an issue with Twitter. I use Twitter to record interesting links for future exploration but after a few weeks it may be hard to find them. Wave does provide tagging and you can embed a search field. However, the better feature is the way you can embed Waves within Waves by drag and drop. This allows you to create tables of contents and indexes in a “master” Wave that links to the details within each Wave.
Lars and his colleagues next covered the extensions offered with Wave to enable development of applications by others outside Google, as well as inside. They gave examples of applications that they built using these extensions. One I liked was a smart spell checker that looked at the context of the word. For example icland is an icland was transformed to Iceland is an island. Another automatically put in links.
You can also make extensions that integrate with other tools such as Twitter. You can write tweets in Wave and they appear in Twitter or vice versa. Of course, other Twitter related apps also do this. They showed how Wave could be integrated with an issue tracker. You can take comments from Wave and load them into the issue tracker.
I think this integration and the development of more focused capabilities that sit on top of Wave will be key to its success. As I mentioned earlier, I think that the completely open Wave will get some use as a novelty and even as a collaboration platform. However, it is too open ended for many work applications, as people will not want to recreate the functionality and features. It can potentially serve as a meeting point for applications. On the other hand, people might want to shape application themselves and not be forced to follow the structure of existing applications.
Since Wave may serve as a useful meeting place for applications, it may not replace many but become a useful platform. Paula pointed out t me that Dion Hitchcliffe wrote a preamble to this in 2006, Blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 as the next application platform. I talked with a number of venders who said they were first afraid that Sharepoint would be a heavy competitor. However, they discovered it opened more doors than it closed. Sharepoint is getting more companies involved with collaboration and these venders can integrate with it to bring in their specialized functionality to a bigger audience. I think a similar thing many happen if Google Wave takes off. It certainly has expanded the playing field and should be a positive thing for enterprise 2.0. Like many tools, I do not think it will live up to its wildest supporters or act in the market the way its hardest critics propose.
(Bill, here I am cross-posting my comments from this link: http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/06/12/my-notes-and-thoughts-on-google-wave-video-demo/, as mentioned yesterday in Twitter... Thanks for the heads up!)
Hi Bill! Very interesting and insightful overview of where you think Google Wave may be heading. I surely agree with most of your comments and concerns that Wave would need to address in order to make things working all right and in the right direction. So we will have to wait and see what happens.
Earlier on you asked me in Twitter what I thought about Wave itself and although I am still working my way through putting together a blog post sharing my thoughts about it, I thought I would drop a quick comment over here talking about what I like about it and what I think needs to be improved ...
Let's start with the things I like about Wave:
1. The ability to replay back Wave conversations is a screencasting capability finally coming true! Really enjoy such capability to catch up with already existing flows and finding out straight up front how the conversation evolved. Although perhaps it would be more compelling if I could have the option to add audio as well.
2. Federation: I agree with you that the exciting thing about Wave is what folks would be able to do with it by extending the capabilities beyond everyone's imagination. In a way, pretty much the same kind of extensibility Twitter went through at the beginning with the open APIs. But I think Wave will have to face a much more interesting challenge: how to penetrate the Enterprise 2.0 scene providing something that's not already available elsewhere. So I am looking forward to seeing how developers extend its capability.
Now, on to the things that I think would be more interesting for folks who keep asking me whether Wave is the next kind of social software tool for the Enterprise. My two cents is that it is not. And it will not. Wave is not a social software tool, because to me it misses two key capabilities that social software and social computing provide nowadays:
1. Ability to discover new content and bump into serendipitous knowledge discoveries by nurturing personal business relationships that will keep boosting plenty of collaborative and knowledge sharing activities. With Wave you can only "collaborate", if you would want to say that, with those folks who you already know. So that serendipity is out of the equation. And it becomes much more of an issue with item #2...
2. Wave only focuses on the people you know rather directly; they know your email address, therefore they invite you to be part of the Wave conversation. That's fine. It's a good thing you can do already with email and IM; but what happens tapping into the outside world? That one of the weak ties, of those folks who you do not know enough about just yet, but who can provide and generate plenty of business value by getting exposed to them and their generated content in the social network space.
That's something that Google Wave doesn't provide and as such, to me, it won't be a collaborative and social software tool, because it fails to meet the fundamental needs of how social networks operate, relying on those weak ties.
Like I said, I will be blogging some more about this pretty soon, but for now these are my two (long) cents... Thanks for the wonderful blog post!
Posted by: Luis Suarez | June 17, 2009 at 07:41 AM
Luis Great points. I too really like playback. You also exposed several current flaws for Wave as an enterise collaboration tool. I think that not only the ability to discover new content is an issue but also the ability to even go back and discover your own content after a period of time will have to be addressed. This is an issue with Twitter for the long term as I mentioend above. This limits its ability to provide the knoweldge management that so many other enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms offer as a by product of useing them. Point two is also well taken. Twitter is great for this even more than blogs but blogs beat the current version of Wave. As I summed up the success for Wave will come from what people build on top of it. They will need to address the issues you raised.
Posted by: bill Ives | June 17, 2009 at 09:58 AM
Hi Bill! Great follow up! Thanks for adding further up! I agree with you on the issues of re-finding content over a period of time, specially for power users of these social tools. It'll become a larger issue more and more and why most of these social tools would need to address and fix them. Including Twitter.
Twitter, even worse, perhaps. The fact you can't have a history of tweets from more than 3 months is not something that most knowledge workers would be willing to go through; the reality is that Twitter wipes out that history entirely. So folks would need to apply "local" strategies. In my case, for instance, I mark as favourites all of the tweets I am interesting in keeping up with, those including golden nuggets or interesting URL links and I syndicate that feed, which means I still have got access to all of those from my offline feed reader and can refind and reuse them easily once again.
But, like you said, there needs to be better ways of managing such vast amounts of content generated by knowledge workers over time and somehow GWave will have to prove its worth in this area, too!
Thanks again for the feedback!
Posted by: Luis Suarez | June 17, 2009 at 11:38 AM
Luis Thanks for the twitter archive tip. I still go back to stuff I put on my blog in 2004. See you next week. Bill
Posted by: bill Ives | June 17, 2009 at 11:53 AM
Hi Bill! You are most welcome! Yes, I know what you mean, which is why I still have got some issues when they say that tools like Twitter can be flagged as microblogging tools. Well, not really, I cannot go back to my tweets over 2 years ago, when I can do that very well with every single blog post I have put together regardless of the blogging platform. Wish folks would realise about it and use the correct terms ;-)
Look forward to seeing you next week as well! heh
Posted by: Luis Suarez | June 17, 2009 at 12:40 PM
Luis - Yes, this conference seems ot be a good reunion for many people. I am sure the tweets will be flying. Bill
Posted by: bill Ives | June 17, 2009 at 01:49 PM
Yes, indeed, I surely hope so, too, Bill! I shall be looking forward to your panel session on how Twitter changes everything. Can't wait for that session & learn plenty more from a great gathering of brilliant panelists! See you there!
Posted by: Luis Suarez | June 17, 2009 at 07:28 PM