Waving Hello and Goodbye

One of the things that truly fascinate me these days is Google Waves. It gives me the feeling of coming home. I mean there’s nothing in Google Waves I find “wow’ish” in the sense that I haven’t seen it “done” before- independently that is. What makes me love the Waves is how the thinking has been put together to erase the borders between different technologies.

The first thing I loved about my waves was the old “ICQ” way of communicating. You remember those guys from the late 90’s? I’m currently testing the environment together with a developer in the U.S. and the first time we waved online at the same time, I laughed loudly by seeing my question answered before I had finished the sentence. This happens as waves are instant keystroke by keystroke and so the message you’re typing is read and understood even before its final. Like ICQ in the 90’s.

Now you can add more people into the conversation and if they join late they can even press the “playback” button and get a rundown of the previous part of the conversation. The next great thing is to insert a comment directly into a previous sentence or relate it to a word or part of a sentence. So when I’m invited to join my kids discussion about their weekend plans (let’s just envision for a second such a remote possibility..) I can comment on my son’s party plans and attach my message directly into that part of their conversation. Better even; I can drag some pictures from my favorite ski resort onto their conversation and ask if that could be an alternative to the planned party? Even when dragging a cluster of highres images into the wave, the images will be visible to the others in low resolution almost instantly, and loong before they are actually loaded onto the Wave servers. I really love this.

Now, Waves wouldn’t fascinate me the way it does if its thinking didn’t invite for much more practical and real life applications to me than chats and playful stuff. Most of our software development days are spent on issues far from programming chat rooms or picture sharing software. A good deal of our work is related to “numbers” and “workflows” within systems like Human Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management and Financial Systems. Not many “wow” factors there you’d say..?

Well let me take you into the future here with some of those applications. In our FutureWorld, independent systems from various vendors will be blending together on “Waves”. This means that instances and their related pieces of information will be made visible across boundaries and platforms and presented on your screen despite the fact that you never even installed the piece of software where the action is now happening! It’s now coming to you on a Wave. Still a bit unclear you’d say? Let me feed it to you.

In this scenario your accountant is just updating the company books and in the process has just entered your expense record from your recent trip to Paris. Now he entered the debit / credit amount of €250.00 for your hotel, and then wonders if any mini-bar items were included in the invoice. He simply marks the voucher amount, right-clicks it, and posts it on a wave to you where he adds his comments. You will immediately get the wave as a blinking “conversation” at the bottom of your screen and are free to answer it now or later. Let’s assume you will choose the latter. In this scenario your accountant will soon finish off with his work and go home for the day, while you’ll be ordering your take-out pizza for your (too regular) office dinner.

When you later in the evening open his wave you’ll see the complete transaction in a window together with his question. You can directly reply to the wave like you would to a chat, and drag an image copy of the mini-bar bill, which you have kept separately, onto the wave. Or record and add your verbal comments. This way or that way, tomorrow morning your accountant will find your message and image attach to the voucher itself, inside the bookkeeping system. And it will remain there for the eternity of the transaction, and available for the auditors if there’s ever a second question to the issue.

Similarly a security inspector who is out on an oilrig in the north Atlantic can open a real-time video stream on his iPhone and connect with a Wave to the security officer in Stavanger. Now, integrating text, video and voice, two senior managers are added to the Wave to make a decision, and the complete record of it all is forever stored in the Security system of the company.

Now these future possibilities makes a pretty big WOW to me.. and only your imagination will be the limit to where you can go with your applications.

For starters, I think you just got a hell lot closer to that Indian accounting guy down in Hyderabad..

Comments

[Sumedha]

I didn't experienced Google Wave as yet (other than watching demos on the You Tube), but I feel it's instant like early ICQ and conversation streams are private such as traditional email but flexible as ever.
This would be the next generation platform of the communication at any levels.