It’s Old

Why it’s bad:

Email was invented 40 years ago to deal with a very different set of communication problems. The web didn’t exist, and email was a simple way to get text from one place to another. Think black screens with green writing and geeks talking to geeks across America. Now we have Twitter, Facebook, and whole new ways to communicate, but our basic building block is email. Everything useful eventually finds an implementation in email, but it’s ill-suited for the task. Sure it’s universal, but just sending images was an afterthought!

How Google Wave can help:

It’s built on the latest proven internet technologies. It’s built from the ground up to handle rich media of all different types but still retains some of the things that worked for email in the beginning, like addresses using the @ symbol to send messages to the right place.

It’s Slow

Why it’s bad:

When you send a message to someone, you hope they’ll get it before you need a response, so savvy users know to pick up the phone if they need an answer quickly. In some cases you might have IM available, but what if you need to send a document? You’d check that they’re on in IM then switch to email when they respond. How convoluted is that? Or worse, you call them and ask if you can send them a document. Not very efficient is it?

How Wave can help:

Wave tells you when a user in your contacts is online. You can “ping” them to ask if they can chat, then send them the document all from the one interface. Then you can get feedback in real-time!

It’s Racist

Why it’s bad:

Email was built on ASCII - a set of characters based on english letters and a few symbols. It took years for email to learn how to use international character sets, and even now if your email service is set up badly you can have trouble sending messages in anything other than plain English.

How Wave can help:

Because it’s being built right now, Wave is multi-lingual. The interface hasn’t been translated as such, but there’s nothing stopping users using characters in their native language. Not only that, but Wave can actually translate one language to another on the fly with the help of a bot and Google’s translation service!

It’s Wasteful

Why it’s bad:

Email creates a message and sends a copy to the recipient. Then they reply, and the sender replies back and so on and so forth until there are multiple copies of the message, often with earlier messages still attached taking up space and using resources. When Aunt Helga sends her holiday snaps to everyone in her address book, every photo gets stored on every mail server that receives it, accumulating gigabytes of data all around the world in mail servers.

How Wave can help:

The Federation protocol requires the originator to “host” the message for the rest of the recipients. So when Aunt Helga sends a Wave full of pictures, the message is accessed right from her own provider, so it’s only stored once. This multiplies a bit when other Wave providers are involved, but not as much as the potential email has for wasting space.

It’s Difficult to Follow

Why it’s bad:

Imagine our mythical Aunt Helga again if you will. She’s planning a trip to France with her daughter Julia, so they email their ideas back and forth about the sites they might see when they get there and who they might sponge off. After about 10 emails, Helga wants to make a list of all these places, but has to wade back through them all to find each mention of a place-name. How inefficient! Tragically she misses a couple because she doesn’t recognise the names. Then Julia asks if she can bring her friend Tracy and they have to start all over again to make sure they cover the places Tracy wants to visit too! Not to mention the new conversations they must start with their French relatives to ask for a place to stay and to find the best sights to see while they are there.

How Wave can help:

Helga starts a wave and adds Julia. When Julia asks where they’ll go, they begin a blip right there to brainstorm ideas, while they discuss other aspects of the trip further down the wave. When Julia realises she wants Tracy to come she adds her directly, and Tracy can see exactly what they’ve come up with so far, and can even play back the wave to follow the discussion. She can also edit the “places to see” blip to add her own ideas. Finally, once Helga has contacted the French relatives separately to ask them nicely if the three can stay with them, she adds them to the ongoing wave to give suggestions and ideas right there in that same blip!

It’s Full of Spam

Why it’s bad:

Do I need to answer this? The problem with email is that anyone with your address can send you something. Of course, this has allowed email to grow into the juggernaut it is, because it’s just so damn easy to send information to people. However it means that anyone with your address can send you any old rubbish, and (at least before today’s exceptional spam filtering) it will pop up right in your inbox with all your legitimate mail.

How Wave can help:

Google Wave also has a spam and abuse problem at the moment. However I believe there are a number of ways Wave could begin to tackle spam, which warranted another post.

It’s Insecure

Why it’s bad:

As touched on in the Spam section above, email is trivial to spoof. Anyone can send email as anyone else. Some email providers offer some protection against this, but like almost every modern feature of email this was an added afterthought, and can not be presumed of every email client and system. Additionally, you might log in securely (using an https:// address) to your email, but unless you go out of your way to enable it your mail is generally not sent and stored securely. Email providers do what they can to secure it, but insecurity is built in!

How Wave can help:

We’ve already seen that waves are tied to the originating Wave providers, preventing spoofing. As an intrinsic part of this security, all wave communication is encrypted from end to end, meaning someone watching the data being sent between wave clients will not see anything useful.

It’s Limiting

Why it’s bad:

With the technology of the internet getting faster, smarter and more secure, people are finding new and unique ways to use it. It’s common to have two, three or more places where we must go to check for news and messages. Numerous attempts have been made to unify these streams of data into one super-inbox, but none have really caught on.
Email is still the dominant form of messaging, and most new services end up providing some sort of email gateway to their service. For instance, Facebook users can now reply to messages and posts via their email, and third parties let you follow and reply to Twitter users through your email. These solutions are usually tacked on as an afterthought. Email was not intended for many of the roles we shoehorn it into.

How Wave can help:

Wave is being built from the ground up to be customisable and extensible. The Wave API allows for the creation of Robots and Gadgets that each have a defined role in customising a user’s wave experience. Robots can be used to change the behaviour of waves (by importing Twitter notifications for instance). Gadgets can enhance the interface to add tools and options not available before (a voting gadget or similar). I can imagine eventually plugging in the sites and notifications I want using my choice of Bots and Gadgets. Such options are only limited by the imagination of developers.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/lovati/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Why Email Needs Replacing (or Why Wave Matters) is a post from: The Geekorium

Installation of the Wave Protocol [Google Code]

Wave Protocol Installation Instructions is a post from: The Geekorium

To me, this is the most exciting and wonderful part of Google’s announcement. No one company stands a chance of dethroning email as the reigning form of communication on the ‘net. By opening up their idea, Wave stands a chance of becoming the way we communicate into the next decade. Only by giving users a choice about where their business critical data is stored will users begin to trust Wave like they have learned to trust email.

Google have stated that when they launch Google Wave, anyone will be able to download the “lions share” of the code to run on their own servers promising that the open-source code will run and operate almost exactly the same as the Product they offer on Google’s own servers. They liken it to the SMTP (email sending) protocol — open for everyone to create and use their own implementations as they see fit, and email has taken off because of it.

Wave the Protocol is a post from: The Geekorium

Google Wave was recently announced at the Google I/O developer conference. This is an amazing video and well worth the hour and twenty it will take you to watch it. If you’d like to know what the future of web communication might look like, you can get a head start right here.

Wave Preview at the Google I/O Developer Conferencee is a post from: The Geekorium