Google announced at their I/O developers conference a new communication tool called Wave. It is touted as how email would work if it were invented today and aims to encompassed multiple types of modern communication protocols and styles. It certainly sounds interesting and my interest was further piqued by the fact that it will be (a) open source and (b) has been developed up to now in Sydney.
Wave runs in the browser and uses the HTML 5.0 implementation, reinforcing Google’s platform independent stance and again reduce dependence on the desktop and desktop apps. The main idea appears to be that instead of a message email-like message being sent to the recipients mail server and then downloaded the email exists on a shared server and is merely viewed and interacted with by the recipients. Users interact on these messages if they are simultaneously online in an instant message style conversation. When further recipients are added they are able to review the conversation so far by playing it back.
Sharing images is accomplished by dragging and dropping from the desktop to the browser. So much more intuitive and all people who are privy to the conversation see the images and can share them and download them. Conversations can be embedded in web pages.
I didn’t watch the whole demo, but what I saw looked interesting. Currently Wave is only in developer preview but it certainly looks promising and could, perhaps replace traditional email. One bar to its success is the reluctance of people to move to the cloud. We like to have desktop applications and given that access to our precious data when it is on a server and not our desktops is subject to the vagaries of internet connections and server uptime, perhaps this is not totally irrational.
Keep and eye out for Wave. The developer preview demo can be viewed here.
