Last week I posted a remark on Twitter:
Can’t help thinking that the idea that Google Wave will replace email rather misses the point….
The first response to this echoed my view on this suggesting that the real nature of Wave is rather harder to explain or understand, and implying that people fall back on a frame of reference with which they are comfortable. It certainly looks as though Google have anticipated this and offered some easily digested marketing messages. However, I also saw responses which suggested that some people still seem to be missing the point. One response insisted that Wave would only be successful if it was ‘integrated’ with email. I must confess that I still don’t understand this – I can’t really imagine what impact an integration between Wave and email would really have.
It seems to me that Wave is an ambitious attempt to exploit the idea that one future for the Web lies in social networked activity clustered around shared artefacts. Such artefacts, often what we still call ‘documents’, have been given the useful label social objects. At the centre of a Wave is a social object, with a series of applied and recorded operational transforms. Wave would therefore seem to be primarily about collaboration, as opposed to email or IM which are primarily concerned with messaging. Another way of looking at this would be to suggest that Wave is ‘object-centric’, as opposed to email which is message oriented with a facility to attach auxiliary objects.
The idea that Wave would replace email seems to be suggesting that we won’t need apples anymore because now we have oranges. This is not to say that Wave might not better fit some use-cases currently served by email – such as the problematic mode of collaborative editing of documents by sharing copies sent as email attachments. But even as we adopt better software for collaboration, there’s not much sign that we’re giving up using email. I don’t know about you, but my email inbox isn’t getting any smaller just because I use Google Docs, IM, Twitter…. Email has been tested quite thoroughly now over a few years, and appears to work quite well for asynchronous messaging!
Wave uses XMPP as its underlying protocol which is both interesting and important, but it is also slightly misleading as it implies an important connection with ‘instant messaging, which I think is illusory and unhelpful.
Wave is possible because the barrier of network latency is gradually being reduced. Real-time collaboration across the global network is now viable for many. Of course Wave is not the only game in town – other interesting approaches (mostly also using a variation on the pubsub paradigm) to the real-time Web, such as pubsubhubbub are being actively developed and experimented with. But Google Wave is important – because it’s Google who are doing it. It will gain a lot of publicity, and will likely play its part in driving a culture change allowing real-time collaboration across the global network to ‘go mainstream’. It should be remembered that Google’s Gmail, the poster-child for Web-based email, is still significantly smaller in terms of users than Yahoo and Hotmail.
Because Wave offers APIs to developers and users out of the box, I think it is going to be difficult to say what shape this new offering from Google will take once a significant number of people are using it. The ability to federate Wave services could be significant in this respect.
Tags: Wave
Paul, I think you’re on the money, not least of all in highlighting the potential emerging importance of anything this size _and supported by the Big G_ but also in terms of highlighting the “replacing email” as being a false assumption. I recently commented on Dan Moon’s blog post about getting rid of email pointing out that 1) I don’t feel that email needs replacing (in fact I think email is about the most powerful collaboration tool there is) and 2) even in a world of AllOfThatWeb2Stuff you *still* rely on email as an “alerter” _for all that other stuff_…
The idea that Wave is “primarily” about co-authoring collaborative documents, or “social objects” as you put it, is what is in fact missing the point. Google explicitly say that Wave is about messaging, IM *and* collaborative authoring of documents, if you watch their “loooong video”, not just one or other of these elements. The demo shows this very clearly.
Thus it seems that Wave is fundamentally an attempt to integrate email, to integrate IM, and to integrate the collaborative authoring of documents. The idea here is that breaking down the boundaries between these technologies is the true value of the service. Twitter and blogging integration are already offered.
Drawing upon this, my point was simply that migration to such an integrated approach would be easier by providing simple methods to integrate with conventional email, IM and so forth. That would make it more useful to people who do use Wave because they would be able to communicate with people who don’t do so but with the additional choice of doing it within one system.
The fact is that sometimes services are obsoleted, at least in practice in terms of user numbers. They may remain technically very useful nonetheless. An example is IRC whose user base has collapsed and is no less effective for those that still use it. In the same way, I predict that Twitter will die in due course, being one of the less impressive services of its general type despite its present (short-lived so far) success.
The same could happen to email if Wave became successfull – although I will refrain here from the use of my crystal ball! I’m not sure whether this will happen or not, but it will be interesting to see the two compete because Wave will be doing messaging, IM and collaborative authoring whereas email covers only one aspect of these. It’s worth remembering that people do complain about email, e.g. spam, attachments (which you point out), lack of real-time conversation, the inbox problem. The lack of real-time functionality could be see either as a weakness or a strengh, but of course different users prefer different things. Wave seems to have the disadvantage of not allowing the user much privacy when authoring a document, unless the instant authoring feature is deliberately switched off.
From reading around on the web, I see that far better informed commentators than myself have widely remarked on the issue of email integration, so I’m clearly not an isolated voice here. I suspect we will all be clearer about the issues when we’ve had a chance to actually use Wave with our colleagues.
good post… and it’s good to see the point about apples and oranges being made as it’s spot on.. it’s not there to replace email but to offer an alternative approach to object orientated messaging…
wave looks a good step for more efficient communication… in my post Mike refers to, I was suggesting #noemail not because I feel it *needs* replacing… I just feel it to be an inefficient medium for collaboration and alerting…
as with that post and this i think it’s all horses for courses… the key thing is that tools are coming out like wave which give opportunity for new ways of working which for some will be like a dream come true and for others it’ll be all very pretty but the email inbox just works…
as an FYI since using tools like gDocs etc I’m down from circa 100 emails a day to < 10. Didn't happen overnight but then nor did Rome…
the biggest win about wave, imho, is that we're talking about what works, what we need and what can be improved in our productive lives.. always a conversation worth having
@Talat:
I don’t think I have ever disagreed with a comment on my blog so thoroughly before!
We’ve already rehearsed this argument, so I’ll leave for others to join in if they like.
Note there is a mini-thread of responses about this post on Twitter already.
“(Google Wave is) … designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking”
“(Google) … wants the Wave protocol to replace the e-mail protocol”
These quotes come from the Wikipedia entry for Google Wave, but similar comments (although hard to find!) can be found on the Google site. I don’t think there is much doubt that Google are at least targetting some of the uses of e-mail – I wrote about this on my<a href="http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/bucs-and-computer-tools-for-communication/< blog post.
Whether Google succeeds in its aims depends very much on the reaction of non-IT people, most of whom, in my experience, are very conservative and resistant to change. For most people communicating by e-mail is well established and changing a system is hard – as Macchievelli realised in the 16th. century:
“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one.”
Yes, I’ve read the Wikipedia entry & have seen various bits of marketing blurb on Google sites. “Will replace email” just seems to me like so much advertising sound-bite material. In this respect, it has been successfull. I just don’t think it bears analysis.
I really don’t buy the idea that non-IT people are particularly resistant to change to be honest. If this is true, how do we explain the incredible success of Facebook?
Well time will tell as they say, but I doubt whether anything is likely to replace email in the immediate future, even for those uses where it is far from the ideal solution.
Facebook (and other sites such as MySpace) didn’t really replace anything, they created a new market – as did Twitter. Anyway, how successful is Facebook? Except for people who work in IT, I know of few people over the age of 30 who use it, or any other similar site, and most of them are mystified why anyone would want to use social networking.
Good – I think we’re agreed on email!
Regarding Facebook – I guess personal experiences vary tremendously. The vast majority of my Facebook contacts are non-IT people in their thirties and forties. This is because I don’t use Facebook for professional contacts – I use Twitter: my Twitter network is consequently very different.
Interestingly, there seems to be evidence that the fastest growing age group in Facebook is the age range 25-44 – the demographic appears to be ageing overall.
@Mike (first comment at the top):
Absolutely agree with you about email. I complain about it daily, and I work hard at managing it, but used properly it is still powerful technology.
[...] Paul Walk — a good read on comparing Wave to email. [...]
Hmmm, you mentioned Facebook. The only reason I use Facebook now is that some of my best friends are on there and they flatly refuse to use Twitter, or Flickr for pictures. So I’m stuck with it as the only form of doing any contact or photo sharing / commenting. TBH I’m a bit resentful of this. Every few months I get a little spike of enthusiasm and try and give Facebook another go, but the effort doesn’t seem to justify the personal satisfaction.
I had a go at Google Wave with some US librarians, but the speed at which things went up just made me feel … old. So I stopped.