The new email
Recently I was having a meeting with a friend of mine. As we were talking about Social Media he said “you know about Google Wave right?”. To be honest I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. As I am a professional web developer with a team of 27 dedicated Ruby on Rails programmers who also have talent in other big platforms like .Net and the PHP programming language I thought “how could I not know about this new technology?”
Turns out I have been to busy building websites to notice that Google announced its new revolutionary product to the public just a few short months ago. I first started my search by typing in Google Wave into Google. I found the first result was this 1.5 hour long presentation that left my jaw on the floor.
Google is about to reinvent the most common social media tool available today.
The video starts out talking about how email was created nearly 4 decades ago before the internet was a thriving success. Email tends to be something we all take for granted because it gives us our mailing address in the internet universe. Not everyone has facebook, twitter, google chat, instant messaging, skype etc… but nearly everyone has email these days. Personally I have met illegal migrant farm workers that spoke very little english who use email on a daily basis. Email has had its day, it is a huge part of many peoples every day lives. I personally read several hundred email messages a day. I even have a special system to categorize and track my emails because I get so many for so many different reasons.
As a marketing medium email is replacing print and direct mail advertising!
So how can this widely used tool that everyone uses be upgraded? Who knows, but google decided to upgrade email with gmail, with this new project google is not trying to upgrade email, it is trying to reinvent the concept of personal communication on the internet.
If you have yet to see the presentation I urge you to watch it. Imagine a tool that has the following capabilities:
You can send messages like email, but in real time, something even text chat can not do.
It can act like a Wiki, or a community document.
It can correct spelling mistakes instantly, in multiple languages.
It can translate as you type
Drag and drop file sharing
The ability to embed the string of messages/document/wiki/photos/vidoe in a website or blog post.
You can play back the history of the message and watch its evolution.
No one message is ever sent from one person to another. Instead all of the messages live on a server, so all changes to the “wavelength” (series of wave messages) are submitted to one location that stores the waves.
So what does this mean?
Imagine you sent an email with a document attached, but afterwords you realized you left out an important part of that document. Instead of resending a second document you can simply edit the first document after you sent it, because the document was the message.
Imagine making changes to a file at the same moment another person is changing another part of it.
Imagine now that the entire platform connects to the rest of the social media universe. Now your email conversation can be included on facebook and shared with friends, while also being embedded on your blog. Instead of visiting any of these locations you read the responses from one location. Make the conversations you want public, leave the rest private, or a mix of the two!
Imagine this service also connects to other mediums like smart phones.
This is only a tiny piece of what this system will do. Google was brilliant in designing this application because they decided the entire system will be open source and will allow federation. This means you can host your own wave service and it will automatically connect to Google’s wave service. This is the same way email works.. email is not a system any one person has ownership over.. email is a protocol. Google wave is more than a robust web 2.0 application with more break through features than anything before it.. Google Wave is a protocol! This is the biggest leap forward in personal communication since the invention of voice over ip telephones.
I am putting my bet on google with this big gamble. Here is why:
Google had the google maps team develop it. These two brothers that developed google apps single handedly wiped every other maps site off the grid with their amazing maps API and the developer community who has used maps to change the way maps are experienced online.
Because google is offering transparency, open source, a protocol, and federation this new product from google is going to become the next sensation. This will dwarf Gmail, Maps, and possibly even Youtube in its reach.
I am not sure email will every really go away, but I would bet that Google Wave is going to put a huge dent into how many time consuming emails I have to read, and I look forward to that day.
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Aaron Mills is a Project Manager for Jailbreak Creative. He has many years of experience working in the web industry and regularly works with local and national clients on a variety of web projects.
Aaron has extensive experience working in both PHP and Ruby on Rails Projects. Aaron also does work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and web marketing. 
