"Social"ing the email - openly!

This week has been rife with raves & rants about Google's Wave & Microsoft's Bing. Adding my two cents to it.

Someone told me that Bing was "But its not Google". Don't know the sentiment behind it, but for me its been a let down. Go to the site & you get only a coming soon message. Hit the link there to watch a video thats promising the stardust from the Andromeda galaxy or the magazine both in the same place under different categories. Watch the video to understand what I mean, it shows off what can be done with Bing. Still waiting for them to deliver. I've become resigned to their failing servers, remember their recent product launches?

BTW, Bing seems just a re-branding exercise by MSFT for their existing Live Search. But wonder why they chose such a word that has lots of negative meaning attached to it!

Wave too is currently a vaporware but at least the site has a video that is more than mere teaser/marketing & gives you links to other places with info related to it. To give credit to the MSFT marketers, they have done a far better job than the techies at Google, by keeping the length of the video pretty short.

Now I'll delve a bit on Google's Wave since its all about "social"ing the email! What exactly is Wave? And why is it such a big deal even though theres nothing in it to show off until later this year?

To get some more background on Wave hit their About page or Mashable's guide to Wave.

Google defines Wave thus on its site:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

The above diagram from ZDNet blogs tries to define whats happening in Wave. Its a very interesting post by Dion Hinchcliffe. But if the terms Wave, Wavelet, Blip confuse you look at the below graphic:

Still confused? Well you just need to read that Mashable Wave Guide. Yet all these are mere technicalities.

The real crux of this post is to scrutinize the "social" aspect of Wave. Though Google likes to define wave as a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, I like how Mashable has put it:

It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

As per the "social"ing of enterprise apps description, an application becomes social if it allows its users to share & network. And this the Wave allows us to do by the cart load. It remains to see if it allows people to "follow" or "friend" inside an enterprise. I have not been able to figure this one out, but I hope that its "follow" rather than "friend". How do they differ?

In a "friend"ing app one needs to take the permission of the other person they want to network with & only upon agreement by both parties involved is a "connection" created, over which sharing happens.

In a "follow"ing app one keeps sharing stuff & others listen in. If others find the shared stuff interesting then they "follow" the person. This person is now under no compulsion to "follow" back. So the networks are more value based & not imposed.

It would be great if the shared stuff is by default available to the whole enterprise & restrictions have to be explicitly imposed, say to keep the discussion within a project team due to NDA agreements with the customer for whom the project is being executed. The conversations are then discoverable by the others in the organization & experts, otherwise not known to the initial team, could join the discussions. Also, others interested in a topic but not with much knowledge could just listen in to the conversations & learn from them.

The same when applied to the enterprise & customers, then the open conversations forces the enterprise to always be truthful & accountable. Privacy issues can be overcome through private discussions anyhow.

So no wonder am looking forward to the Twave extension for Google Wave. :) There are lots of other promising examples of the Google Wave. Do have a look at them.

Last but not the least, Wave is based on an Open Protocol! :D Not only has it created an open protocl, Google has also contributed the patent covering Wave to the public domain! What more can one say? :)

If you are interested in implementing the wave protocol in an application of your own or are interested in building the Wave API or using it in your client applications, please do feel free to read the Google Code page for Google Wave API. :)