Google Acquires Etherpad

From february 2010, the Etherpad team will be working fulltime on wave. This is good news for anyone who's been annoyed by the beta-flavour of wave's collaborative editing features. Etherpad has been around for a while, and is far more mature than the current collaborative editing features in wave.

This also means that Google continues to invest in the further development of Wave. (Not that we doubt this, but it's nice to see some real tangible proofs of commitment like this)

Samuel L. Jackson Rides The Google Wave... Pulp Fiction Style

A very good way of illustrating the use of Google Wave :-)

Sandbox Access arrived ... oh wait ?

Early this morning, I finally received a long awaited email saying that I was invited to the Google Wave Developer Sandbox. I tried to clear my schedule for the day as good as possible for some first experiments, only to find out that this "invitation" required me to fill in another form.

Finally, the form tells you that it will take a couple days to process your request and *really* grant you the access. They make fantastic technology, but the folks from Google Definitely know how to tease people the right way as well.

Sandbox Access is finally coming

There was an interesting announcement on the Google Dev blog today. They stated that after granting sandbox access to 5800 developers from google I/O, and various developer day events, they finally started distributing accounts to people who filled in the request form.

What really makes me check my mailbox every five minutes now is the fact that they are distributing accounts mainly on a first-come first-served basis. So I hope you filled in the form right after you saw the Google Wave I/O video.

Emerging Wave Applications

A batch of Developers received access to the Google Wave sandbox and guerrilla coders around the world are unleashing their creativity on the defined API.

The PyGo wave server is a non-google developed server on which you can get an account today. And more important, you can upload your own bots and gadgets to share them with other PyGo users.

There are also two emulators out there: Avital Oliver's Emulator, inspired on the earlier Vidar Hokstad iframe emulator

On to the applications ...

Grauniady - Guardian Google Wave Prototype Robot

Grauniady (grauniady@appspot.com) searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase. This robot is a great example how mainstream media could use Google Wave.

Wavethingy - The first Monetizing Robot

Andres Ferrate demonstrated Wavethingy (the first monetizing robot) at the first Google Wave API hackathon.

Wavethingy (wavethingy@appspot.com) searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.

Bloggy

Bloggy publishes the contents of a wave, to a blog, comparable to what you saw on the google wave demo.

Thanks to wavety.com for the contents of this post

Is Google Wave just Gmail on Waves?

In a previous article the question whether Google Wave can tackle the ever growing inbox was raised. A few tips were tossed, mainly suggesting user discipline assisted by Google Wave.

I haven’t played with Google Wave yet, my thoughts in this article are solely based on screenshots of the Google Wave client (see for example Figure 1). But when I compare those screenshots of the Google Wave client to Gmail it seems to me there’s not much difference. We still have a central inbox, only now it contains waves. While I love the wave concept, I fear Wave extensions and robots will only increase the size of our inboxes.



Figure 1. Google Wave. Source: The Official Google Blog

There’s no doubt waves have the potential of drastically changing communication and collaboration. However, assuming the screenshots are representative, I do doubt the current Google Wave client will improve the management of my inbox. In this article I will try to figure out a way to collect and present waves to the user without cluttering their inbox.

Inbox vs. Archiving

On of the key points from the previous article is to delete, act on and/or archive mails in your inbox. This in fact got me wondering, how or what do I actually archive? In my case, I have about 1400 messages in my inbox, another 1300 archived. Archived mails mostly include newsletters, iTunes receipts, serial number of programs I bought, et cetera. On the contrary, my inbox contains all kinds of mails, but mostly conversations with contacts. This means my archive is actually cleaner or better structured than my inbox! Or at least the way I am archiving is not sufficient to cover all emails in my inbox.

Before going further, let’s take a look at some other inboxes.

Snail mail Regardless what you do once you’ve opened the envelope and read your mail, you never put it back into the mailbox! In the laziest case, you either throw it away or put it on a pile. Otherwise you classify the mail in categories such as correspondences, bills, magazines, commercial, ... Mostly without even realizing.

Task Managers They often provide an inbox for quickly gathering new tasks from emails, sms, webpages, et cetera. Once you have a spare moment of time, you start labeling the tasks, pick a due date and assign them to projects or more general context (cfr. GTD).

By some mysterious mechanism these kinds of inboxes end up empty. Mysterious? No. Snail mail of course takes up physical volume which is either limited by your mailbox or your hallway. Regarding task managers, I guess we simply prefer shorter task lists over longer ones.

So do we need ways to classify waves in our inbox? We already have labels and filters, you say? True. We all know the combination of labels and search serves as an alternative to folders, that’s what Gmail is about and Google Wave seems to use the same principles. However, labeled e-mail keeps sitting in front of us in the bloated inbox unless we archive it which is just putting it on a second pile. So there’s actually no real difference between the Wave inbox and the Wave archive. Both pile up to a confusing mess of waves which we have to query to find anything (luckily Google is good at that).

Another View

So we need ways to classify waves and move them out of our inbox. We need to bring some of the inbox cleaning mechanisms from snail mail and task managers to the wave inbox.

So let’s start with automatically moving waves out of the inbox once we’ve opened the wave and start classifying the wave right away. The default classification could be archive. I know, now we’re creating one big pile again, but let’s take the Gmail concept of labeling and saved searches to a higher level. Since we can expect an explosion of robots and gadgets, we can use them for a more intelligent classification (even before we opened the wave).
In my eyes the central view on Google Wave should be something along the lines of Figure 2; an (almost) empty inbox and saved searches. I call those saved searches views on my wave collection. Like the current filtering system, we can create views based on labels, based on contacts (Friends, Family, ...), but also based on collaborations and documents (Project X, Project Y, ...), based on robots (Facebook, Bloggie, ...), based on gadgets (Chess, polls, ...), date ranges and so on.
You might even go as far as deleting the notion of an inbox altogether and simply define a view of new waves. Conceptually this is even more beautiful.



Figure 2. A mockup of the concept of Views in Google Wave.

You’ll notice each view has a badge counting the number of new waves for that view. We could even add more badges such as a badge for the number of active waves. Views based on robots and gadgets could define their own badges. For example, Taskie may count the pending tasks, while Facebookie counts the number of updates and wall posts separately, ...

So with one eye drop on this Google Wave mockup I see what’s actually new in my inbox, using the top view icons I see a summary of new, active or otherwise classified waves in my wave collection. Those are positioned central instead of tucked away in a sidebar. Finally, the active view presents me a filtered list of only those waves I am currently interested in.

Start

While Google say they started with the question “What would email be like if it was invented today?”, I can’t help but think they actually started with “So we have our mails in Gmail, what else can we add?”. They’ve build an amazing platform, but it’s not quite there yet. However, I think under the Google Wave hood we have the right engine to go beyond Gmail on Waves and change our views on waves.

How Google Wave can clean your email inbox

In the past, Google innovated email usability with the Gmail platform, including functionality such as innovative spam detection, coversation threading, labels and filters.

Although other email applications showed similar features, enabling you to structure the contents of your inbox, Google made the use of filters and labels very efficient and usable.

At this point, it's clear that Google Wave has the potential to have a tremendous impact on how we communicate and consume information online. However, it's very unclear at this point whether we will be able to consume information more efficient, or whether we'll end up with a gigantic (over)flow of low-relevance bits of info.

If an electronics company will invent the best vacuum cleaner ever, it will only yield better results in the hands of someone who can grasp the concept of the device, and use it on a REGULAR basis. Maybe the handling of the electric chord will become handier, or you don't need to replace dustbags anymore.

The question is, is Google Wave a revolutionary vacuum cleaner, or can it be an automatic, laser system that automatically avoids that there is no more dust in your house ... ever.

Although I'm very enthusiastic about the platform and it's potential, I'm afraid we're looking at a revolutionary vacuum cleaner, instead of a silver-bullet no more dust solution. We will get great tools, but in the end we will need to be responsible power users, in order to fight your ever growing inbox.

WHY is your inbox always growing today ?

Preparing this article, I looked at my own inbox of 5000+ emails and wondered how it got to this point. Let's look at some obvious and less obvious causes:

Spam, advertising, newsletters reside in my inbox, although it's very unlikely that they contain information that I need, or want to read. During the day, I delete and archive these types of email all day long. For newsletters that I want to keep, I create a label, and a filter that avoids them ending up in the inbox.

Unread emails Funny enough, there are emails in my inbox, that I consider important, but they remain unread and gradually sink further down in the inbox. In many cases, this is because we can identify the information in the email, by the title. The reason why we (or at least I) leave it in the inbox, is because there is some kind of action related to the email, that needs to happen somewhere in the future. For example, you leave these because you want to reply to them later. Or when someone sends you a shopping list, you leave it unread until it's actually time to go to the shop.

Emails that we've answered. We leave interesting dialogues in our inbox. If we are the ones who answered last in the conversation, why do we leave it in the inbox ?

I believe, as an email users, we constantly ABUSE our inboxes because we have a deep FEAR TO FORGET.

And strangely enough, inboxes are very bad containers to truly tackle that fear. Your messages will sink down as new ones arrive, regardless of how important they are. If you don't remember by yourself to go back a few days in your inbox, or to look at "starred" emails, these messages will get forgotten. Unless the person who originally sent you the email, sends you a reminder. Today, huge amounts of time are being lost on writing reminders, and reading those reminders.

Aside from the fear to forget, some people just get too much professional email to read in a day. Even email that you actually should read. Although I believe this is very rare, this could be happening to you. In this case, it will often relate to overwork or too much projects. Address these issues to your boss, and get a grip a set of responsibilities and tasks that you can handle in an 8 hour working day.

So how do you tackle this ?

Assuming that this "FEAR to FORGET" is the core source, and making abstraction of the possibility that you would simply get too much emails in a day, here's what I thought of.

Embrace search: Search in email applications, and in Google Wave, is nowadays very good and powerful. In many cases you'll even be able to search the full-text of attached documents in your email. Look at search as a solution to solve your fear to lose information. Keep archiving those conversations or waves.

Extract a task from an email, and put it on your calendar If an email is important NOW, answer the email or execute the task you need to execute and archive it when you're done. When the information is important in a later point in time, make a reference to the email in your calendar, at a later point in time. When you come across an email that doesn't require action now, or in the future ... I'm pretty sure you can archive it, and search for one of the keywords if you want to retrieve it.

Be disciplined about it ! It will be your responsibility to constantly wonder: WHAT do I need to do with this info and WHEN do I need to do it. Make that decision before you archive the email. You'll see that your calendar will get fuller, and your inbox will remain clean.

If I can do it by myself, what will Wave do for me ?

Good news, you don't need to wait until the end of the year & Wave's release to have an empty inbox. However, Wave will make the whole process a lot easier.

In Depth Calendar Integration A wave will be much more flexible for in depth calendar integration, as opposed to an email message. If this gets implemented the right way, the difference between the email message, and the calendar item will become very vague. Let's say I am invited to a new wave, in which people are constantly updating it. It can be very disturbing to see it "pop up" every time again, if it's not relevant for me at the moment. At that point, I should be able to add a calendar//planning robot, that allows me to archive//hide the wave and it's updates, until the point in time that I specify in the future.

A wave client could come and ask me, for every wave that's in my inbox longer then ... (you can fill in this), at which point in time I want to do something, or whether I want to work on it immediately.

Priorities for communication from certain people and entities. Wave requires an invitation to take part in a wave. Robots, that you authorized can also channel information from other sources. In any case, you end up in a network of communication where you have some notion of the source where the information is coming from. I truly hope Wave clients will allow different views on incoming waves, depending on how we grouped our contacts. This is not rocket science: you can do this for yourself today using labels and filters, but this can be heavily optimized.