Spouting Shite

Initial thoughts on Google Wave

Google have announced the imminent release of a new communication and collaborate tool called Google Wave (http://wave.google.com). This is a technology that was developed by Lars & Hans Rasmussen and a team of Google developers in Sidney Australia. I watched the 80 minute demo of the tool that Lars Rasmussen gave at the Google IO conference in San Francisco and I have been asking myself a few questions over the past few days…

1. What are my initial reactions?
   As with all Google products or services…I am extremely impressed. I have not decided if I will ever use this service, but I see a value for it and I see that it will probably become very popular.
2. Is this truly unique or new?
   It’s not often that people invent a completely new product or service. Most new products of services are re-implemented versions of their forbearers or results of UAOTATC (unique assembly of tried and tested components). After much thought, I believe that Google Wave is both. It has remarkable similarities to Microsoft Groove and Microsoft Sharepoint while also looking like a Frankenstein version of email, IM, Google Docs and wiki.
3. Is this a replacement to traditional email?
   Firstly, I don’t think that it would be possible to replace traditional email. While I believe that email is deeply flawed in its current guise, I feel that it is too deeply integrated into our lives to be washed away by this technology. With that said, I can see a world where email and wave work alongside. Wave can become a welcome addition to our communication tool set which already includes email, IM, blogs, Twitter, social media sites (Linkedin, Facebook etc) and Wiki.

   Mass adoption would be helped if it was built into normal SME mail servers (such as Mdaemon or even Microsoft Exchange) and traditional email clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook. That way you could read emails and ride waves from the one client. I can’t see integration into MS products any time soon but due to the open-source status of the code I would be surprised if modules aren’t released for other products soon.

4. Will this be the end of spam?
   Well…we have been predicting a technology that would herald the end of spam for almost a decade. Ending spam is the ‘holy grail’ of email and many companies have set their sights on this and failed.

   Research around this area has focused upon the reciprocity of the email sender or server. This is a theoretical value that quantifies the persons online reputation. If we can quantify this properly then we could disregard the emails of people with bad scores. RBL’s and DCC try to work in this area. This research has also been built into most social media services, but while it is very useful for personal relationships online, I believe that this sort of analysis fails once you bring it into the business community because:

   a) Businesses want to receive emails from un-know people…they could be from potential clients
   and
   b) Just because you have a good reputation online does not mean that I want to communicate with you.

   This is the reason why email spam has not been wiped out yet….we want to stop spam but allow unsolicited emails.

   To partake in a Google Wave it seems that you need to be invited…so it would seem that it is very unlikely that spam could be sent using waves…but you could be spammed by people inviting you to join waves in much the same way that you are spammed by invites to Linkedin and Facebook.

5. Will this aid Google’s domination of the world?
   No…Google is not trying to dominate the world…but they are a commercial company and they are trying to make their products and services ubiquitous. Google Wave will help with this goal…this is neither wrong or evil.
6. Why did Google make the code and protocol open source?
   I guess that Google want to get a higher presence in the business community. This is where all the money is. Most of the existing Google services are fully hosted services…the user has little access to the data and has very little control over it….this is one if the big stumbling blocks that this community has is data protection and data persistence. Giving the business community the ability to host their own server breaks down some of these barriers.

So, in conclusion, I guess that Google Wave is going to be very popular…but I cant see in what markets it will succeed and I dont believe that it will make email redundant.