I need to disclaim my glee by ensuring you all that I am NOT an ‘early adopter’… Generally speaking I’m skeptical of “new revolutionary technology to change the world, save time, protect bunnies and make sure senior citizens in Florida don’t get sun burned.” But I this time I’m just too excited to not jump on the hype bandwagon…
Google is cooking up a new web product called “Google Wave”.
It’s difficult to explain, but the gist is that rather than email being a package that gets delivered from point A to point B. Google instead is treating the ‘email’ as a destination. A single package that users can connect to, edit, make additions and then notify others connected to it that it has been changed. The changes that Wave will allow you to perform include basic text editing (like email) but takes it many steps further. Easily add audio, video, polls, translations, images and just about any other media to the Wave.
The glorious thing about this is that it would mark an end to long and confusing “reply to all” email chains helping to keep everyone on the same page and make clear who is contributing what to the conversation.
In certain cases when multiple people are editing a Wave the edits will appear on everyone’s screen in real time! It’s more like having a real conversation and thus can be a huge time saver, protect bunnies and possibly keep the senior citizens in Florida from getting sun burned.
Wave is currently in beta (and probably will be for a very long time) but some invitations have been dispersed. If you’re interested leave a comment (with your email address) and I’ll send you one!
-Paul
