Google Wave

[mollipen]

Soooo... anybody get in? If so, do you have invites burning a hole in your digital pocket? I'm sure somebody (me) around here (me) would love to have an invite.

Also, tell us how it is. I'm tired of 20+ year old shitty email, and would like to know if Wave is less shitty or not.

[cka]

I can't see this replacing email, but I can see it being used as an email-like application for interoffice communications

[bbobb]

Isn't it just IM?

[mollipen]

I thought it was supposed to be like IM + email 2.0 or something. I don't think anybody truly knows yet. All I know is in all my years of searching I've yet to find an email client that is worth a damn, so I keep hoping.

[cka]

google wave, from what I understand watching the demo vid a while ago, is collaborative software on steroids which means it won't easily replace something like "email"

[K3V]

Allegedly I have an invite on the way, but they take some time to go through. We shall see.

[Drewbacca]

We're using it at our work. It's amazing. But it will not replace e-mail. Nothing will - e-mail has basic utility that is key for business.

It will not replace e-mail for business. Which could potentially be what keeps it as nothing more than a fringe technology. If they tied it in to a mailbox kind of thing then maybe. But one thing that is great about e-mail that it ISN'T as urgent. You can save messages from yesterday with attachments you may have accidentally deleted - there's a good utility in it. On Wave you're given a shared whiteboard area to collaborate and share notations on, which is what ICQ used to fucking have. Nothing on it SO FAR that I've seen is at all revolutionary. The same way Facebook isn't a revolutionary idea on the internet - we had geocities and angelfire and webrings to link them previously. Facebook just came along and did it with better and intuitive tools. All in all Google Wave is great, though. Very helpful.

But this is amazing for conferencing and working across broad distances. My company has 2 offices. OnE in Toronto and a big one in Mississauga (a big town bordering on Toronto). So working between studios with it has been great. Although it's really nothing we couldn't do with desktop share, video chat, messaging and e-mail previously.

[Doc Holliday]

I thought it was supposed to be like IM + email 2.0 or something. I don't think anybody truly knows yet. All I know is in all my years of searching I've yet to find an email client that is worth a damn, so I keep hoping.

Expand upon this. What are you looking for that Outlook can not do?

[mollipen]

Expand upon this. What are you looking for that Outlook can not do?

Well, I wouldn't exactly consider Outlook to be a good starting point, but I'll talk about email in general.

My main problem is that I'm running a dual-core 2.4GHz machine with 4GB of RAM and an OS released in 2009, and I still have to use email clients that are dumber than friends list features I can find on a freakin' game system. To my email client, every piece of email that I get in is treated the exact same way and with the exact same priority, until I manually tell it not to do that through a long and extensive list of "rules". Why am I even creating rules? Why does the email client not HELP me sort through this mail, or WANT to understand what mail is important to me and what might not be?

First of all, an email client needs to understand people. I have a photo app that can collection pictures of the same person together by analyzing faces in the photos; my email app can't do that when it has specific email addresses attached to each piece of mail? On every email, there should be a way to flag the sender as having some relationship to me: Family, Friend, Work, Online Retailer, Social Group, let's say as a start. I flag a person once, and the email app then understand a basic level of importance to any mail I receive from that person and any mail I've already received. Somewhere in my email client, I have a "People" option. I go to that option, I see a list of names, and I can easily find every email I've received from a person. I would also, through this, very easily be able to associate any list of email addresses to a person, even inactive ones, so that it knows that that email I received years ago from "xb214@aol.com" is really my brother.

Basically, start with a perception shift away from email addresses and to people. The people are important, not the addresses.

Then, for example, the app would automatically know how to give me recommendations for email to read. It might say "you have 20 new emails today, but these six are the ones that are really important, because they're from friends and family." Some of the ideas I have around this can certainly be done today, but the point is, they aren't done easily. I shouldn't have to craft a big list of exceptions and rules to tag and sort email when the app could easily be doing that for me with just a minimal amount of input from me.

The next step would be to move to a more iTunes-esque set-up where you have one huge dumping ground for all of your email, and then how you access that mail is all done dynamically. There would be a few benefits to this. First, you could do a lot of crazy filtering/sorting/tagging of email from IMAP accounts without ever disturbing the filtering/sorting/tagging of that mail when viewed in other ways if you didn't want to. Second, you could have an infinite amount of "copies" of an email in various places without having to actually physically move it from one mailbox to another.

So, here's a mock-up for a revised version of Apple's email app I put together a while back:

Click for full size


First, I'm viewing my email by person, since the app already knows people and which mail is attached to them. Next, all of my chat logs for a person are also collected here along with their email. (Since I believe mixing chat logs in with email makes more sense than keeping each separate.) You also see things like "bundling" various email together that are part of a particular theme. This could be done countless times since it's just tags and not moving copies of the email, it could be "smart" so that the app keeps tracks of threads of an email and puts them all in the bundle, and adding in new or old email or chat transcripts to a bundle would be easy as well. So, for example, if you're working on a project, you could keep track of any email / chats associated with that project without needing to make a new folder and physically moving the mail.

Smarter thread-tracking would also be a must. There's no reason an email app can't do a quick scan of the contents of an email to see if it contains pieces of a conversation that's been taking place recently. (Or there's got to be some sort of tagging that could be done in headers so that better threat combining could take place.)

The problem is, email is old and boring, and people care about new and sexy. So long as email "works" and you can read it, that's all that really matters to most. I just think there's some nice things that could be done with email to provide a much better experience than what we're getting now, even if it's just looking at how we do things in a new way.

[Josh]

Do you not use gmail? Most everything you want is how my inbox is currently set up.