Isn’t Google Wave Just Advanced IM?
May 28, 2009 by Rico Mossesgeld
Filed under Services
In summary, its creators bill Google Wave as what email would look like if it made its debut today. And through O’Reilly Radar do the makers publicize Wave and its upcoming launch. Instead of emails grouped into conversations, we now have Waves, individually described as a cloud-based conversation. Essentially, Wave is more about collaboration rather than communication.
It’s the initial description that pushes me to describe Wave as advanced IM, not email. The yet-to-be-released service seems to come across as an amorphous group chat, but with the ability to pin your replies or comments onto a specific portion of the Wave, just like pointing out a specific picture within an album and starting a discussion over it. Thus Wave communiques seem to take a more multi-point approach, again much like many people expressing themselves within a group chat, rather than the one-to-one or one-to-many reality of current email.
Thoughts? Question? Violent reactions? Leave a comment below. You can sign up your email for Google Wave’s launch notification on wave.google.com.
