Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > May > 28 > Entry
Google catches a Wave; don’t get seasick
Google today announced “Wave,” a kind of middle-ground between instant messaging and e-mail. In fact, if what we’re hearing bears out, it could be a way to make disparate things that Google owns — say, Blogger, Google Talk, Google Maps, Docs and G-Mail — work together in new, interesting ways.
A “Wave” would be a conversation between two people that can be updated instantaneously. Photos, search data or map info could easily be shared within this wave and more participants could be added to the conversation, like a Google Doc file. The wave could be published easily to a blog (ooh, that sounds dangerous!) that would continue to update live items from that wave, such as new search results or updated spreadsheet data.
I’d be loath to suggest that Wave could replace e-mail anytime soon. People have been predicting the demise of regular e-mail for years; it hasn’t happened. But, based on a newsroom training session we did recently on e-mail, some people do use their electronic mail the way you’d use a phone when you’re waiting for a call or an instant message where you’re continually engaged in a conversation. Wave might be able to bridge that gap between real-time communication and the way we work with e-mail.
Visually, it looks a bit cluttered and foreign, but then that’s how G-mail and Google Reader feel before you get used to their interfaces.
What do you think? Does Google have a winner on its hands here?
(More details here and there’s a video below showing what it can do.)
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By Marina Martin
May 29, 2009 5:56 PM | Link to this
I consider GMail's current filters to be sub-par as compared to Outlook or Mail.app, and I see zero mention of filters at all for Google Wave. This makes my brain want to explode!