Open eyes Working brain

Google Wave is an impressive product. If you haven’t seen the Google IO Preview video, i highly suggest you do it know and come back later. Even if you don’t care, there’s a long list of smart ideas, patterns and neat technical solutions packed into Wave that deserve to be studied. Let me mention a few:

• One unique state, on the server
• Operational Transformations
• Statistical spell checker
• Real time collaboration
• Real time search
• Federation
• Playback of changes over time
• Applications as Robots
• Openness of protocol, api, extension

and much more, but even though all this goodness and google involvement are exciting and indeed already suggest a planetary success, i am a little skeptical.

First, in our times of overwhelming complexity, when products like Twitter can WIN not by augmenting capabilities but by restricting them (to a single short answer), Wave  rich complexity will have to prove itself. But there’s more. Something feels wrong to me in this catch-all approach to communication, and i came to believe it’s how all this empowerment is unevenly distributed among different facets of communication itself.

Let me explain trying to determine a few of those facets:

• Retention. How long information will remain available. e.g. From ephemeral spoken words to durable written words.
• Responsiveness. Whether information is taken in immediately or at a later time. e.g. From asynchronous mail to synchronous phone.
• Relevance. How much information is specific and important to a certain matter or goal. e.g. From generic chit-chat to focused articles.

It’s easy to see that high retention and asynchronicity are symbiotic. There can be no asynchronous transfer of information if that information is not stored somewhere waiting to be consumed. What’s harder to see, but empirically true afaic, is that high relevance is related as well. Maybe it’s the effort traditionally required to store information in a durable form, maybe it’s because people have more time to think on what they want to say, maybe it’s that information is produced in isolation helping to concentrate, but it seems asynchronous highly persistent communication tends to be more focused, worth and relevant.

• You’d write a book about origami, but probably not about your last vacation.
• You’d write a blog post about your last vacation, but maybe not about today’s weather.
• You’d twitter about weather, but hopefully not that you’re turning down volume on the ipod.
• Yet you could say that to a friend being around.

Conversely, as communication responsiveness bar raises up, we keep putting in more and more trivial, irrelevant, conversational stuff. That’s easily common sense. Take the word “chat” and how it often has negative connotation. Chat as a waste of time. Chat as enemy of focused productive work (pomodoro technique anyone?). It would be foolish to say that all real time communication is irrelevant, or that irrelevant information is always bad, yet down that path, we often digress from the meaningful and, in that circumstance, high retention is at least useless if not undesirable.

So what’s the problem with Google Wave?

It innovates by opening the entire spectrum of responsiveness possibilities. Users can communicate from asynchronous e-mail to true real time chat. Wonderful. But what about other facets? 

• Retention is fixed and very high. In fact so high that waves can be viewed as conversations or even documents. Stored forever in the cloud. I guess they have or will have a delete button but that would be quite coarse-grained anyway.
• Relevance has even weaker support. You have wave title and tags and that’s it.

Without further control, i don’t see how people will be kept from mixing those different kinds of communication in wrong ways, especially as number of participants goes up. I imagine carefully built documents polluted by real time blabbering, collaborative flame wars producing endless amounts of noise and whole branches of waves slipping out of topic. Trivial fast-paced conversations and relevant slowly crafted documents, all together in a persistent rich beautiful mess called the wave.

I hope to see odds of such hellish prophecy mitigated by some good moderation system and/or by giving better control on retention, otherwise Wave may become yet another perfect illustration of “giving enough rope”. In conclusion, some pretty tentative attempts to contribute:

• an additional chat system orthogonal to wave content
• tags and votes on content and ability to show/hide based on that
• content that fades away unless marked “important”
• content time to live