We’re now a little over a week into the extended roll-out of the preview build of Google Wave. This is an important time for the service because many people can now finally start using it as they eventually may — which is to say, with their friends and colleagues. Of course, the backlash is also already in full-swing, as expected. But I can’t help but wonder if this backlash and the hype that it is a byproduct of, is blinding some to the larger picture. Google Wave is not just a service, it is perhaps the most complete example yet of a desire to shift the way we communicate once again.
The Wall Street Journal has a long article about this today, noting “The End of the Email Era.” But most of that article is spent focusing on how Twitter and Facebook, which is to say, status updates and the streams, are replacing our need for much of what email has provided in the past. Only very briefly do they mention Wave. And I think that overlooks something.
For many of us, email is simply not cutting it the way that it used to. It’s a sedentary beast in a fast-moving web. It uses old principles for management, and this is leading to overload. I think the key statement in the WSJ is this:
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone.
That’s absolutely true. But that also implies that we want some sort of always-on communication connection. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we want the option to communicate in real-time at will, but also the ability to communicate at our leisure at times. I would consider this to be a desire for a “passive-agressive” method of communication. Perhaps it would be better stated as a “passive/active” method of communication, but passive-aggressive sounds better, so we’ll go with that.
I would consider email to be a passive form of communication. I don’t mean that you don’t respond to it, I mean that you don’t have to respond to it right away. Instant messaging is at the other end of the spectrum. If used correctly, it’s supposed to be an “aggressive” or “active” form of communication in which you respond immediately. Twitter is very passive because the use of it is such that people don’t even necessarily expect a response of any kind, even if they point a message at you. Facebook is a mixture of all of those things (more on that below).
Google Wave is attempting to be a passive-agressive form of communication. You can actively (aggressively) engage in threads in real-time, or you can sit back and let messages come to you at your leisure (passively). Having used the product for a few months now, and after using it quite a bit more actively with my friends these past few days, I really think that Wave is onto something with this method of communication. I would argue that Google Wave’s new message alert system needs to be somewhat reworked or re-imagined, but I do think the desire to blend passive and agressive methods of communicating is there.
We’ve been slowly building up to a system like this. Gmail has for a while offered users a nice blend of email and instant messaging on the same page. And while it is nice that there is also the option to archive all your chats for searching purposes later, there is no good way to say, see that you missed an IM if you have a computer with Gmail open at home while you’re away and checking it remotely. You also can’t check these easily via IMAP on your phone, and the like.
And while there is the option to reply to emails by chat if that person is online, there’s no real integration between the email message and the IM message, they exist as two totally separate things. It seems like we’re at the point now where that shouldn’t have be the case.
Others, like Yahoo Mail, are now trying to tack-on status updates and the stream to email services too. The result is a Frankenstein-like service.
Facebook is another interesting example in that, as I mentioned, it combines all of these elements: Email, IM, status updates, and a stream. But the connection between all of these things in that system is loose at best. From a unified communications standpoint, Facebook is really kind of a mess. There are whispers of changes, and I hope that’s true, but I’m not holding my breath for a service with 300 million users to do something new and drastic that will alienate a certain (probably large) percentage of its base.
That’s why Wave is interesting. It’s backed by a huge company, Google, but it’s not trying to shove this upon all of its Gmail users. Instead, they’re going to slowly roll this out and see how users end up using it. And maybe more importantly, they want to see how developers start using it.
And that’s really a key that a lot of early users are overlooking. Right now, when people hear “Google Wave,” everyone seems to want to place emphasis on the “Google” part of it. But the truth is that the grand goal of the team behind the project is to emphasize “Wave” as both a platform and a new communication standard.
Whether Google Wave succeeds is really irrelevant. More important is if the idea of Wave does. Again, the idea of passive-aggressive communication.
Wave, the Google web-based client, will only ever appeal to a certain number of users. Does anyone really think that Twitter would be where it is today if they only had twitter.com? No. Wave desktop apps, and mobile apps, internal company Waves, and public Waves; it’s the platform, not the product, that’s interesting. Or, more to the point, it’s the key communication idea behind it.
[photo: flickr/matheus sanchez]
i prefer mail, I don´t lik e facebook.
the fact that you commented on this about 35 seconds after it was published is impressive.
he broke the embargo
Niko is trying to prove that you don’t need Wave.
You just need to sit and wait for posts at the very second and post like it’s real-time.
Howlarious!
Impressive, to have read a full 2 page article in less than 35 seconds.
indeed.
I have replied very early on Wave. I think that Wave is really really special if it solves the scale problem.
Also, the post misses an important point. The wave has a special feature of near real-time communication. It is not just passive active (I agree that it is a point, but not the only point) feature.
The whole notion of near real-time and full media interspersed with history, conversational threading, group-ware together is a whole new FORM of communication. It is also a message board.
The idea is convergence of the features rather than isolated batch of disparate features.
Finally something new to hype besides Twitter! How many Google Wave posts will we see on Techcrunch within the next week?
quick, to the hype machine!
MG, I agree, it’s not hype, and I think you are hitting the right theme here for the future.
What you are missing is the long, awkward phase we will be entering where there will be a lot of confusion about if someone Waved some communication, tweeted it, or e-mailed it.
Twitter will be, I think, the odd one left out. It will be the fax machine of this decade.
I explain why here:
http://bit.ly/18HCT4
Google trying to reinvent email is like microsoft trying to create a search engine. It will always be an up hill battle. Wave is just another attempt at Google trying to get into social networking. Whatever good comes out of Wave will just be replicated and trumped by Twitter and Facebook.
If you try to say that google folks can’t make IM products i state you wrong. Friendfeed is 100% google folks :) If wave is simple to use, people will adopt it. Everybody can use MSN, anyone can type a mail. If you can do that, you should be able to wave. If you cannot, then the product needs to be redesigned.
Excuse me but Google has already reinvented email once before with Gmail. I don’t see why they couldn’t try it again.
Microsoft making a search engine is entirely something else.
Every Third Article is either about google/apple/facebook or twitter. I’m thinking of starting a count..infact lets start from the latest main page
Google: 2
Apple: 2
Twitter: 2
6/20 (and I’m only going by the titles)
ok we’re timing you. don’t fall behind!
I totally agree with the concept of Wave, as trying to redesign or redefine email.
I have several friends who almost stopped using email alltogether. They simply message each other on facebook, using each other’s walls or the private messaging (kinda like email) Or the live chat.
But facebook wasn’t designed for that at all. So it’s a mess (an even bigger mess than mail today)
I’m 100% behind GW, and hope it succeeds as a concept and that people don’t get stuck on what they see on wave.google.com.
cheers
agreed. good thoughts.
A large part of online population think email means outlook express. In that ways Exchange is a platform in itself. Can Wave replace this? Or will it always run as a parallel for early adoptors and geeks.
Joao, i do think when we use email for corporate, you are gonna communicate through facebook or twitter. Gmail is here to stay , is wave positioned to replace the MS Exchange or just be a geeks alternative. I wonder.
Problem with redefining/redesigning (or replacing…) email” is that email is not owned by anyone… Wave is. By Google.
With that being said… it’s still a very interesting piece of new thinking.
Hang on…
Wave is also not “owned” by anyone. It’s a concept and a protocol. Right now it runs on Google’s servers, but sooner (or later) anyone can run their Wave server. Much like anyone can run an email server these days.
And in that aspect, it is more open than twitter, since not everyone can run a twitter server.
That is one of the key steps for adoption of Wave as a concept. That it is open.
Yep like Joao said, the ultimate idea is for Wave not to be owned by any one company. Right now, the people making it work for Google so of course it will be associated with the, but they plan to open-source it, much of it is already.
Is it just me or is anybody else thinking that Google keeps the development of the Wave platform close to themselves. I still have to learn about any major outside influence/contribution. I don’t mean the third party applications and bots that use the Google APIs but some contributions to the platform itself. Anyone tried? You can play on their playground but can you co-design/change it?
I’m still trying to get a hold of an invite. If anyone here has one, I would really appreciate it if you could send one my way?
saury316 [at] gmail [dot] com
Would love an invite too at shadesofmike (at) gmail (dot) com!
well done. insightful. as a new writer, i’m curious: how long did it take you to write this?
cheers. s
If you’re a new writer, take a piece of advice from an old one. Use correct punctuation and you’ll be taken seriously. Omit capitalization and you read like a teenage chat-room heavyweight.
First, something off the topic – I see that you’ve abandoned your aweso.me URL shortener and you’re using bit.ly now. Why? And why not j.mp?
Anyway, I think you’re right about Google Wave, but it’s still lacking must-have features to complete the idea. Unfortunately, when those features get added, it will become overly complicated.
Email is simple – from, to, cc, bcc, subject – that’s it! Twitter is that simple, too. Facebook – even simpler! Google Wave – not simple now, even less so fully-featured in the future.
how is facebook simpler than twitter?
Not Facebook in general, just it’s internal mail system.
XMPP rises from the ashes. At it’s base is an open source peer-to-peer network which includes the real-time collaboration piece and a stock client. It’s platform agnostic, application agnostic; my wave server gets to play with Google’s wave servers on the same network and share users. If real-time is where it’s at, then this would be it’s uber-channel.
This is one of the more on point articles about Wave; most others seem to miss the point altogether.
The intro video did a great job of laying out the concept behind Wave and the basic interactions, what you can do with it.
Using it is even more impressive. I’ve only been using it for a few days with a number of friends and I can already hear my brain getting rewired.
As I see it, Wave is to interaction/collaboration as the browser was to content. There were plenty of servers on the Internet way before there were browsers. The problem was that you had to know how to access each one (gopher, ftp, http, etc). The browser simply made *access* to that content easy. That motivated people to create more content and the rest is history.
Wave does the same thing for different modalities of interaction: it integrates them and makes them more usable. In a wave, you don’t have to think whether you should use email or IM or Twitter or Facebook. You use the most appropriate modality at the time. If there’s nobody around, you write an email-like message; if there are other users in the wave, you interact with them live.
I believe that Wave, or as the TC post points out, the idea behind it, is as big or bigger game-changer as Mosaic was.
mperez.nearsoft [at] gmail [dot] com
“You use the most appropriate modality at the time.”
That’s absolutely it for me.
Question: If I’m an enterprise-level company, say Exxon or Lockheed Martin, and additionally one that does govt. contract work of a sensitive nature, how does security, privacy compliance, and risk management get addressed? I can see broad CIO/CTO concerns here.
I really have been enjoying Google Wave. I have even had people edit spell check crap for me so they don’t have to whine about my bad spelling days naymore. It’s hella nice! No more spelling trolls.
I sure hope they rework the bot system a bit. Manually adding bots will become a tedious process with time. Maybe template waves that have existing bots already in them would be nice. I don’t want to have to go searching through contacts all the time to find that “one bot” that does the trick ya know?
Other than that I feel like you, MG, that it’s in the right direction for more passive-aggressive communication. I already prefer to wave over IM. Plus waving allows me to “store” the conversation in a way I can go back through and replay. IM on the other hand you just have a log file and it’s not as intuitive.
About five years ago I figured the next explosion was going to be real-time and storage of personal data information. I’m glad to start seeing it come of fruition. It will be similar to those tablet videos Microsoft showed off with the lady browsing through her personal history. Having your personal knowledge available at will, will expand memorized debates into factual discussions and collaboration for truth. I love it.
I effin love technology.
i effin love it too :)
I would lose the Passive/Aggressive title. I have never heard anything positive when someone was referring to someone as passive/aggressive.
Granted you did mention passive/active in the text of your post.
I was still disappointed that after reading your post I did not have any better idea what Google Wave was about. Guess I will have to try it out to see. And that is not a bad thing.
ehh thought about it from that angle too. i just like the way it sounds more.
I actually like the “passive/aggressive” theme- definitely piqued my interest from the start. While it does have a slightly negative connotation — it seems to make a lot of sense in this context (and it does sound better than passive/active).
Sadly, I haven’t tried GW yet but wonder if it could be a new platform for enterprise communication (unified communications from Google instead of Microsoft?!) I would love to completely abandon my corporate email and voice mail.
it’s a catchy title, sure, but i think the potential muddying of what you mean should compel you to choose something better. optional urgency?
I agree with billy buddy. It’s definitely catchy–it’s what got me to click through and read the post, after all. But that was because I initially thought, “Oh cripes, how is this guy going to argue that Wave enables people to communicate dysfunctionally?” Then I realized that you meant something else entirely.
I think “passive aggressive” is a phrase that is largely meaningless to part of the population, but has a very specific meaning to people familiar with its origin and clinical use. I’d avoid it.
“Passive/Active” may not be catchy enough, but I bet you can come up with another even better term that doesn’t confuse your meaning.
It’s not really right to change the meaning of a word just because you think it sounds better. The common usage of passive-aggressive doesn’t at all describe what you described.
@Kristian +1
(But that’s OK – We got the point)
Nice post! I agree that we have been slowly building up to a system like this with real-time, streams and the emphasies on NOW being frequent topics across the blogosphere!!
I think Wall Street Journal will write about Wave when it has actually proven itself, or their readers can actually sign into it.
The idea of passive/aggressive communication …I don’t know. I’m trying to relate it to telephones/voicemail, IMs/Away Messages, or even IRC.
I think this post has a lot of BS, but you can actively or passively disagree.
sweet lucero avatar.
How do you manage the difference beween public and private in google Wave? The important difference is not only passive/active but also public/private.
You have to trust the people who you communicate with. If you do not trust them to keep the proposed bid amount to themselves, don’t share it with them!
Or you can go about slapping the disclaimer at the end of every single thing you write telling me to keep it confidential or you will sue my *ss off. I will promptly send a copy of that email to techcrunch.
Wavelets (threads in the wave) have users assigned to them. If only you and a friend are signed onto a wavelet, then your the only ones who can see it.
The wave application could allow guests to sign into the wave, but that’s up for the application to manage I suppose… its nothing related to the underlying technology.
I don’t know why you’re using the term “aggressive” in this context – it doesn’t fit with the term “passive” at all (ie, it’s not the opposite and nor is it related) and it doesn’t fit with the topic. It’s the wrong word to have around.
What you’re referring to is more a difference between “live” and “taped” (or pre-recorded).
In fact, I would consider probably more so, it’s more of a difference between “warm” and “cool” media, in a Marshall McLuhan sense.
which i noted.
i know you’re trying to be cute, but “passive-aggressive” is a REALLY bad choice of terms. it has very negative connotions and it will distract from what you’re trying to say in a BIG way. seriously – you are making some really well-thought out points but you have chosen a VERY poorly thought out term. not only are the connotations of the term bad but it has a pretty clear definition which is very different from what you’re trying to say. so at best it’s distracting and makes you look glib or rushed and at worst it makes you look really ignorant.
my 2 cents.
well then i guess i’m glib and ignorant. i’m the author, it stays :)
This so called ‘new’ style of communication is rather exciting, if a little daunting at the same time! I can’t see it catching on right away, because most people don’t like change, but when it does (which is probably inevitable) its implications could be huge.
that’s true, most people don’t like change. and this is a very tough hill to climb. if it happens, it will happen very slowly.
Whilst I can agree that in the personal context Twitter, Facebook et al can be an adequate replacement for email I still don’t believe that it’s going to be going away in the medium term especially in the business context.
Why? Because email still has some strengths that these new forms of communication do not have.
1) First and foremost, it’s open addressable. You don’t have to sign up to Facebook to contact someone. You just need to look at the Wave backlash at the moment that is showing how important an open addressable messaging system is.
2) Management tools. Just the fact that Twitter and Facebook don’t have read/unread capability in the streams means that it’s hard to manage. I can’t tell you how many tweets I miss as a result of this. You can’t flag for follow up, you can’t easy forward, you can’t organise in folders. You can’t add a sense of priority. You can easily address multiple recipients (regardless of what network they are on – see point 1), you can choose to send direct/CC/BCC for different circumstances. You might say these are unnecessary, but you’d be wrong.
3) Email message formats are quite flexible. You can’t say everything in 140 characters. As much as you’d like to, you just can’t. So that means you now have to pick a communication mechanism (with different credentials, see point 1 above) to match your message. If it’s short use Twitter, if it’s a little longer, you have to use something else? A blog post? What?
Email has been the most popular application on the internet for years and perhaps with the exception of search remains so and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The feature-set of other messaging platforms needs to mature considerably and then you still have the issue of open addressability to deal with.
wave will be open too. if things turn out alright, you will be able to use other service providers with the wave protocol.
or am i missing something?
You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Back to basics: G-Mail is/was useful in many ways,but it still sucks re. losing unread emails in “threads”, cant add memos to an email, & iphone syncing still has its bugs. So I hope G-Wave solves these issues as well as the others. Cant wait for my invite so can use it.
For managing projects I doubt it will be as useful as Producteev, even when combined with Yammer, but look fwd.
Passive/Agressive = I believe you’re referring to synchronous / asynchronous forms of communication. IM is synchronous. Email is asynchronous. The power of asynchronous communication is the ability to have multiple conversations with the same set of people at once. Not simple to do on twitter.
Another way to look at it would be asymmetric communication, where perhaps one or more parties are dealing with the information synchronously, while another party or parties are dealing with the same conversation asynchronously. That, in my opinion, is the real power of Wave. With IM or Email, all parties are locked into either being synchronous or asynchronous (depending on the tool), but with Wave parties can asymmetrically interact with the thread in whatever way they choose.
Of course I guess that isn’t as snappy as torturing the definition of Passive/Aggressive.
yes, basically.
@artemi:
The ability to have simultaneous and distinct conversations with the same set of people has nothing to do with synchronicity. (Twitter is asynchronous, so you are contradicting yourself.) Simultaneous synchronous communications in groups can be achieved via IRC channels, for example. It is true that most IM protocols disallow it, however.
Do you not think there is a loss of user control when it comes to this always-on connectivity?
I use TweetDeck and find it very easy to become disoriented and overwhelmed by the amount of incoming content, so much so that it starts to beome background noise and begins to lose its usefulness?
With this in mind and irresective of the amount of content each offers, email and always-on services such as twitter address two different needs, the former being much more temporal.
Certainly email will be used a lot less for things such as rss feeds in the future, but will still be there for anything that requires any level of permanancy.
Interesting article, thanks.
I’m curious about your choice of the term “passive-aggressive.” Did you really mean it in the common psychological sense of using inaction as a form of aggression, or did you mean it simply to reflect an option between passive and active communication?
For example, pretending not to hear your boss when he or she tells you do do something is passive-aggressive in the psychological sense. From the article, I wasn’t sure that you meant the term in that way. It would change the way the tone of the article is interpreted, I think?
Merging chat and email does not sound like a terribly novel idea! If that is all what wave offers, I am not impressed!
spoiler: that is not ALL that wave offers.
Passive/agressive is a term used in psichyatry. So, drop it. Passive/active will do it.
that’s in there.
Wasn’t this passive-aggressive form of communication called simply “forums” just a few years ago. I mean the passive / active option you mention were and are, the read-only, reply or create posts functions in forums.
It is amazing how same-ol sheize is rebranded and called “wave”.
Does forum has realtime communication? No
Can we edit other’s post in forum? No
That just shows lack of understanding Wave.
1. Near Real-time
2. Group-ware with shared Edits
3. History
4. Interspersed with Txt, Media, URLs, Blobs etc
5. Version-ed
6. Time-threaded
7. Collaborative
Tell me which other platform has all these feature at A CORE level?
So basically wave is a forum, chat-room, twitter, wikipedia and texting all at once?
i dont think enterprise will catch on to google wave, unless there is a private on site hosted one. information is very sensitive in the corporate world, i know at my company we block sites like facebook and twitter. You cannot mix social and corporate, at least in my eyes.
That’s why Wave is a protocol.
I think companies block facebook and twitter to improver productivity, not for confidentiality issues.
Passive/Aggressive?
I think the that the words that you are looking for are ‘asynchronous’ and ’synchronous. These are established terms for forms of communication such as email and chat.
Wave is a blend of both modes of communication. Polysynchronous? Ambisynchronous?
Bah, missed Artemi’s reply.
Passive-aggressive has a totally different meaning.
The concepts you’re using to analyze these technologies (though you don’t call them that, and I don’t know why) are push/pull and synchronous/asynchronous.
yep, we’ve been over this.
And you must agree that folks have point about it. You should agree that it is a bad term coined….
“But I can’t help but wonder if this backlash and the hype that it is a byproduct of, is blinding some to the larger picture.”
As any programmer knows when you show a boss or a client an early prototype of a software product, you can talk until you’re blue in the face reminding them to ignore certain aspects of the demo, especially cosmetic, and they will miss entirely the cool new features of the prototype and the most likely the first comment they make will be “but can you move this from here to over there? it’s really intolerable as it is.”
For a species with such incredible imaginations, when it comes to seeing something new, we frequently have almost no imagination. This is not a reprimand or a slight, it’s an observation on how simple we are while being so incredibly complex.
Wave’s promise is indeed the platform, but for all the naysayers out there, especially those looking to pump out a quick blog post to attract readers, the Wave client is Wave. As you pointed out it’s not, not even close.
I think public waves may even aid the attention seekers (I wouldn’t scoff at greater readership, it translates into more feedback and a more powerful loop).
As an idea slinger (blogger, writer) platforms that help me connect and engage with other interested minds are priceless. I do my best not to over valuate ideas of mine simply because I made them up. Often if they’re valuable concepts someone is already building/implementing or already finished a variant of it.
Getting massive peer review of connections and concepts helps to quickly filter out the more abstract and potentially less paletable ideas for further refinement. Essentially I listen to the crowd but pursue what is most personally relevant.
Google wave is another protocol for communication. The more open and powerful the core interface of comm tech, the easier it is to develop on that platform, the greater the acceptance to large user populations.
Another great post by my favorite TC author MG
thanks Mark. appreciate it.
In my opinion, the one that Google Wave needs the most is Wave-tiquettes. I can’t imagine a world where people edit other people’s post just for a shake of kidding or crime. Yes the playback functionality is there. but I wonder in a very long conversation how many will eventually use it.
And that’s probably only one example.
A large number of large party crafted etiquette waves are present in wavesandbox.com so hopefully some of that work will spill forth in the coming months.
It’s a very community type feeling seeing edits and post edits like that.
Playback feature will be how the newer art forms are created and explored within the web browser. Eventually, there will be a comedic timing source for playback vs. one wavelet at a time.
yep.
If this solves the SPAM problem then I’m all for it.
How is it that I’m still waiting for my Google Wave invite?
sadly, a lot still are bill. including plenty of TC writers.
Are you telling me your IQ can actually move up a notch? All that you are saying and pointing out is over 4 years old. To think they pay you to do this or worst invest in start ups 2-3 years to do this just show how smart you all are.
Forget all this. If simple minds such as yours and Google Wave engineers, entrepreneurs and to a latter extent Facebook can think of this then there needs to something way better.
I would hate to think that you all had higher intelligence. Thus something new is required to separate the web1.0/2.0 (As webs2.0 was confused with 1% of it available in fb) from the web3.0. No this is not a joke either.
I really think you are all stupid. Though I tend to be enjoying your post of late Mr. Siegler. You seem to be turning out one of if not the better writers at TC of late. There could be one other but his name slips me right now.
wtf?
This is why one should not drink and post.
I really wonder where those 100.000 invites have gone too … there’s just no way that I wasn’t within the first 100.000 requests. So long story short, I still don’t know how wave could impact the internet :)
If we think of a computer as a clerk. What we have done in the past is making that clerk run faster, but we had the burden to tell him exactly what and how we wanted things done.
It’s time to make the clerk smarter and let him do it’s job without me yelling all the time do this and that, file it there so I can tell you later how to find it.
What has that to do with Wave, well Robots. If I can automate to let me know what’s important to me and when, now that’s progress from all the other communication ways. We had this discussion about twitter overload, same goes here. But with the exception of being able to do something about it.
I looked at the API over the weekend, needs some rework to enable all of this. Hopefully somebody will get a clue.
Otherwise great thoughts, I think Wave will be useful.
“Passive-aggressive”?
“You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
that’s a word?
Its inconceivable!
Its inconceivable what?
Nice write-up. Passive/Aggressive (or Passive/Active), Real-time/Past-time, synchronous/asynchronous, these are all labels that I think can be used depending on the audience.
One of the related elements of Google Wave that seems to be often overlooked is the fact that a conversation in Google Wave is captured as a new type of online document that has persistence. Email has persistence, but it is comprised of discrete, disjointed messages (GMail at least provides a threaded display of a “conversation” in email). As you pointed out, IM is ephemeral…if you’re not online at the same time as other participants, you missed the conversation.
In my experience, when people start thinking of a conversation in Google Wave as something that is captured as a centrally accessible, dynamic online document, they no longer try to equate the new model of communication with email or IM (or even Twitter and Facebook). Regardless of whether “passive” or “aggressive’ communication was used, the document (wave) is easily accessed and edited.
As you put it, the platform and network protocol have great potential, and I think the analogy to Twitter at the end of your post is fitting. I hope to see a complete wave “ecosystem” emerge, with various types of clients (apps) being used to access and modify waves (or subsets of them) from various wave providers. If it all works out, waving someone with a Microsoft wave account should be as seamless as emailing someone from a GMail account to a Hotmail account.
some really nice thoughts. thanks.
I thought this was going to be an interesting article that explored how the new means of digital communication encouraged passive-aggressive traits. Or, even more interesting, how the communication tool itself was somehow passive-aggressive. Instead…
I think you are probably on to something. It is a disruptive piece of technology because it seems to only add value if you are working collaboratively.
Those who are waiting for invites should actually ask for TWO because one is kind of a lonely experience. I bet a lot of other people (like me!) are not using it robustly because of lack of time or fear of making yourself vulnerable to other users you do not know on projects/topics that may or may not have immediate value.
The technology may change, but there will always be different communication needs. And u nnles one platform can meet them all at once, multiple platforms will always coexist.
The ancient Romans sent messages by scroll (one to one asynchronous), addressed crowds by oratory (one to many sychnronous) and had private conversations (one to one synchronous).
In the 20th century, the invention of the telephone (realtime/syncrhonous/active) did not kill the written letter (asynchronous/passive), and neither did the postcard.
E-mail is the modern form of the memo or letter. I find that the ultimate communication tool is Yahoo Messenger. Yes, Messenger. Why?
With Messenger, I can make voice calls (VoIP), IM, e-mail and videoconference all with one platform. The only thing it can’t do is this real-time wave/yammer thing, but that is suspiciously similar to an IM chat.
It may not be as glamorous as Wave, but it shows that meeting peoples’ basic, unchanging need for different types of communication is what determines the success of a new product- not how cool the technology looks.
http://www.amusis.com
Given that “passive aggressive” has an entirely different meaning in general use than what the author has given it, I think he might want to change the title or at least have a subtitle that explains that.
um, it’s in there. trying reading said post.
webstandardcss -at- gmail.com
May I please have an invite? Thanks!
Perhaps by the, “dawn(ing) of passive/aggressive communication,” you meant to infer that Google Wave elevates the art of subtle trolling to new heights
ha ha perhaps.
I think Wave is just a replacement for online chat rooms/group chat. It only applies for active conversations, as there’s really no point in creating new “waves” to say “how are things” or “let’s go have tacos” or something that doesn’t require a reply _right now_. I know I’m probably old and boring, as all of the waves in my account tapered out in about a day-two and nothing new happens since, as I don’t use it for work-related activity. I couldn’t figure out to have an easy way to add some bot that generates waves for, say, news as means of discussion/commenting. Interface with wavelets as little things in the toolbar also seems to be extra awkward right now but I am sure it will get fixed
Google WAVE is a function set and mode/state and NOT a destination. But the hype does seem to be working in terms of buzz generation. Too bad all of this buzzing is a WAFT. Great tools and programming. How does this work for me again? Oh, I guess it’s just about the engineering… In that case, I’ll surely abandon all the tools I currently use in favor of yet another flash in the pan.
hi all,
can any one please send me google wave invitation. i eagerly want to use it.
my email id – nisha.khanna90@gmail.com
thank you
nisha khanna
I don’t think Google Wave will take off, its to complicated for the normal user. Its just a glorified chat session, however I can see why it might be useful for collobration.
I think passive/active IS a much better choice of words than passive/aggressive, even though you think it might sound better. Passive/aggressive refers to a type of psychological dysfunctionality and unhealthy game playing. Some readers could get confused by this misuse of the term. Plus, I just don’t think it matches what you’re trying to communicate. Interesting post, otherwise.
Great discussion – I sat and watched most of the 1 hour 20 demo to the google developer community this evening. I think you have to watch that to understand that this is very different.
I think wave is very interesting … especially when thinking of it as a platform. I like the term asymetric described above – because wave is something more than synchronous or asynchronous since you can mix the two. I love the idea of creating wa ve “products” or documents. The play back feature is amazing – this is fantastic design capture of conversations. A researchers paradise. … I’m now going onto facebook to see who of my colleagues if any have had an invite!!
Having said the above any complex product is definitely going to enter the market slowly. Most current products are essentially very simple. Wave does build on concepts that we all know and love .. so hopefully it may be accessible – impossible to tell without playing with it!
Check out the spell checker they have built into wave – it really is very cool (about minute 47 on the youtube video!).
Just as Email did not completely replace physical mail, I think Wave will not completely replace email. Everyone have a physically address and most people have an email address, but not everyone have a Wave account! I think Wave might be able to exist as a complement to email at most. But so far, I have not found much use of the software besides taking class notes with a couple of friends at the same time, in the same room.