Google Wave: Panacea or daydream?

I finally got around to watching the Google Wave developer preview video last night. I'm a great fan of any tool that helps people work better together. If you've not heard of Wave, or not had time to investigate, it feels to me like a hybrid of e-mail, instant messaging, Wikis and SubEthaEdit. Users can create new waves (documents/conversations/communications), make them available to others, and work on them. Wave manages to (surprisingly elegantly) bridge the gap between e-mail, instant messaging and wikis. When you edit a wave, the other person can see your changes as you make them, one character at a time. On the other hand, if they aren't online, the next time they come back online, they'll see your wave waiting for them. This is pretty difficult to describe, but beautiful to watch, and it scales. Watch the video to see what I mean, but suffice to say something which starts off feeling like an e-mail can transparently become a discussion and the reverse is just as true.

There's no doubt in my mind that the technology involved is amazing, but from my perspective, the most interesting thing about the video is that it makes the scale of Google's ambition clear. Google are pretty openly hinting that this thing could become a rival to, or even replace e-mail, IM, Wikis and a whole bunch of other collaboration approaches with a single unified solution. Read that sentence again. A replacement for e-mail; a protocol and metaphor for communication that's been around in more or less its present form since 1982. That's 27 years. 7 years before Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first proposal outlining the workings of the World Wide Web. Google are either seriously confident, or seriously arrogant. Or both.

But. They might just succeed. Unlike many other Web 2.0 services such as Twitter, Google are (at least outwardly) trying hard to ensure that Wave doesn't become a walled garden. Even services such as Google Sites, which offer integration with the outside world using standard protocols (in the case of sites through HTML linking and RSS) don't provide the same level of integration seen in the standardised protocols that support e-mail, IRC and other 'old school' services.

So, what makes Wave different? Google have built, and more importantly released to the public a protocol that allows any old Tom, Dick and Harry to create and implement a Wave server. Moreover, because the protocol is not trivial, Google have open sourced reference implementations of the protocol, and in the video suggest that they're intending to open source the majority of the code-base of Google Wave itself so that competitors can download, tweak and run their own competing Wave services. These services will all federate, and make the experience broadly seamless regardless of which provider you choose to use. Like E-mail, USENET and IRC, information is only sent to the servers supporting users actively involved in the wave, opening the possibility of the (perhaps justifiably) paranoid running their own organisational Wave servers to ensure that content only leaves the corporate network when it is actively shared with a third party. This approach potentially eliminates a major barrier to adoption in the commercial world. Lastly, Wave provides support for Robots (intelligent agents) that can accomplish a multitude of tasks. Google demonstrated Robots that did things like integrating with Google's blogger service and it seems clear this technology could be extended to support integration with existing communication mechanisms, and in particular the big threat: e-mail.

How this all pans out remains to be seen. Google are not an academic organisation, and they must deliver value for their shareholders, but it's fair to say that they have a history of taking relatively large risks by taking on large scale projects with no obvious revenue model that would scare your average VC witless. Despite this, they're still here, and still profitable. I think it's reasonable to say that there's an excellent chance that Wave the product will be a success. I'm much more sceptical about Wave the global infrastructure, due in part to the complexity of the technology and consequent barriers to entry for competitors, but mainly due to something much more human: Inertia.

Regardless of the success of the Wave platform, the debate Wave is likely to stimulate can only be a good thing. The Wave preview opens its doors on September 30 2009 to the next 100,000 users. I have my fingers crossed.

บ้าน (home)

I crawled into bed at 1am last night, no less than 25 hours after getting up. Paradoxically, I only got up at 7am. Aren't time zones wonderful? I've just got back from a business trip to Bangkok and thought I'd post some lessons learnt. In no particular order:

• The weather in Bangkok is hot. Wear short-sleeved shirts. Don't wear ties. Wear a suit jacket when you go out in the evening, you'll look like an idiot. And I did.
• Don't cross roads until you've looked left, right, up, down and have resolved any outstanding issues with your life insurance.
• When you enter your airport taxi, note that it will take exactly 27 minutes before you realise you are not about to die. It'll take another three minutes before you take your hands away from your eyes long enough to notice that none of the cars weaving between lanes have dents, and decide that they are clearly made of reenforced diamond. Or decide that Thai drivers are considerably more talented than you, I or Jeremy Clarkson. Yes, really.
• The people in Thailand are friendly, polite, and remarkably tolerant of our lack of aptitude for their language. Say "thank you" using the feminine version of the phrase for three days, just to keep them amused. We did.
• You've not seen value for money until you've been to Bangkok. Stay in a hotel room as big as your house for £70 per night. Spend 45 minutes watching the meter in a cab slowly reach the £2 mark. Now try doing the same in Farringdon.
• Towers in Bangkok are tall and numerous. Ours had 38 floors. Take pleasure as the high-speed lifts make your ears pop. Bring sweets. Yawn liberally.
• The Starbucks franchise covers all corners of the earth. I strongly suspect they have spread to all nearby star systems.
• Jet lag is a killer. As is the dawning realisation on your exit from Heathrow airport that the English weather is, frankly, rubbish.

More seriously, spending a few days talking to these guys taught us a thing or two about how to communicate with people when you don't speak their language:

• Don't underestimate the people you're talking to - remember the issue is one of communication, not capability.
• Explain things in simple, but not patronising terms - using colloquialisms or slang won't help. Remember that some phrases that are in common usage in the UK might well not translate: We spent two days using the word 'business partner' before realising that this had been misunderstood.
• Use diagrams. "A picture is worth a thousand words" has never been truer.
• Give it time: You might find you need to explore new ways to explain things in order to hit the right buttons. Talk around the subject a bit, go back to basics, find the hooks in their heads that will allow them to understand.
• Find time to swap stories and compare cultures. Not only will this build rapport, but it'll help you to understand where your audience is coming from and what drives them.
• Solicit feedback and encourage questions; you'll get a far better picture of your audience's level of understanding by allowing them to challenge and push back than you will by blindly blithering on at them for days on end.

On Escalating Communication

Just read a good article from Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror, On Escalating Communication which discusses the need to communicate not only the right message, but through the right medium. Amen to that.

I had an experience yesterday where I found I was writing an e-mail on a politically sensitive issue which had the potential to blow up in my face (personal situation, I hasten to add - nothing to do with work). Now, there are two approaches people take when writing an e-mail like this. 1) The Grenade: Don't worry too much, toss it over the wall and apologise afterwards. 2) The Gold Brick: Contextualise and rationalise your argument to the point where it is seemingly incontrovertible, but consequently also impenetrable and arrogant, then toss it over the wall and knock the poor recipient out. I'm generally in the latter group.

I went ahead and began to contextualise & rationalise my key message: "I won't pay XXX for YYY, try again." By the time I finished, the e-mail was 7 paragraphs long, explained my full life story, described my rationale for believing that XXX wasn't the right price for YYY, justified it to the 359th degree, turned around and touched its own toes, but didn't really send the right message. Why? It was too inflexible a communication mechanism for the circumstance. There could be any number of reasons why YYY was overpriced, or XXX was too much. Sending the e-mail as it was could potentially have blown the whole situation out of the water, disenfranchising the vendor and leaving me without my YYY.

In the end, I saw sense and 'phoned the vendor and sorted things out. They're still mulling things over, but I'm confident there's a much better chance of getting the right answer than if I'd hit them on the head with a gold brick.

How do you tell when you're trying to use e-mail to do something it shouldn't be used for? I suspect the answer is simple: If you feel you're having to cut corners in your communication, or you feel like you're trying too hard, then you're probably using the wrong medium. Time to upgrade to a phone call or, heaven forbid, a meeting.