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.

The Google Wave Higlight Reel

For those people, living on the fast lane, who can't spare the 80 minutes to watch the whole demo, Lifehacker created a very nice Highlight Reel.

Early Google Wave Dissection

(guest blog by Steven Devijver)

Over the last couple of days I wrote a seven-part analysis on Google Wave. I have looked at different aspects of the platform and wrote this overview for your convenience.

Part 1: Architecture

Google Wave is based on an associative memory architecture which is unique in the world of social platforms. As with e-mail anybody is free to host their own Wave provider which Google will release as open-source. Because of its architecture a Wave provider never leaks content to the outside when a wave is between participants on the same server, just as with e-mail.

This is a huge benefit of Google Wave because now any organization can deploy its own Wave provider for its own people and prevent sensitive content from leaving the safety of their private networks.

Part 2: Unified Messaging

Like Twitter, e-mail and instant messaging Google Wave has the free-text message as its content model. Yet Wave is different. First of all, participants can be machines in the form of robots. Secondly, participants can add any kind of content to a wave: text, chatting, video, pictures, gadgets, … . Thirdly, each participant can instantly become a co-author.

The Wave team has understood that unified messaging is really about two things: each content type requires certain kinds of communication (e.g. instant messaging requires P2P communication), and content types are defined by our internal articulations rather than by its technical characteristics. In other words, the Wave team has understood that content is a social object as has build the Wave platform accordingly.

Part 3: Extensibility

Robots and gadgets are first-class citizens in Google Wave. This means a robot can modify the content of a wave just as a human can. In the demo video we see several examples of this: converting www.google.com to http://www.google.com and the fabulous spell checker.

Yet the real power of extensibility is that anybody can build third-party additions for their own purposes. These robots can be hosted on any Wave provider, the only thing that is required is to add a robot as a participant to a wave.

Part 4: Collaboration

Google Wave will dramatically change the way we work together as soon as we realize that the waves we create can be harvested for metadata. With this metadata we’ll be able to build smarter robots that know us better.

Part 5: Version Control

Google Wave is not just a collaborative word processor, it also comes with a distributed version control system built in. This is a significant feature, especially for long-term group collaborations.

There are many open-source version control tools available but they’re used by software developers and don't lend themselves for integration in productivity suites like Office or Google Wave. That is way the Wave team has taken the ideas behind Git and built a new version control system for collaboration.

Part 6: Social Network Platform

Google Wave is not just an awesome social platform, it will dramatically change our expectation of what a social platform has to do for us. In general, social platforms have to be able to evolve with the users and communities they host. Facebook and Ning are notoriously unable to do this while Twitter is notorious lenient towards the conventions its users prefer.

It's probably true that complicated data models for social platforms as sported by Facebook and Ning are not a thing of the future. Instead, free-form content models like Wave and Twitter give much more freedom and allow us to organize unified messaging as we see fit.

Part 7: Marketplace

Many business problems are hard to solve for the same reasons that social platform like Facebook and Ning are not very malleable: it's painful and expensive to let dedicated data models evolve with reality. Look at CRM tools, look at sales tools, look at procurement tools. They all suffer from the same design flaw.

Enter Google Wave. We can integrate any business information we want to keep close in Wave through robots and gadgets. Businesses will demand that these third-party extensions run on their own networks. Et voila, the soon-to-be booming market of third-party Wave extensions.

I've enjoyed writing about Google Wave and the response has been overwhelming. Thank you. I'm looking forward to the actual release of Wave and working with others to make their Wave dreams come true.

Google Wave, a certain death for IRC ?

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an open protocol that sits in the application layer of the internet protocol suite. It basically enables users to login to a channel, located on a server, in which they can exchange text strings in the public channel, or in a private conversation with other users.

The protocol and many of it's applications such as irssi, mIRC, .. have been around for a very long time. Many people assumed that instant messaging clients would be IRC killers. But still today, it's widespread and used all over the globe, mainly by a community of tech-savvy users.

Some of the features why people still like to use it are:

• Anonymity - apart from your IP address, that's pretty visible for other IRC users, you're able to hide between an anonymous handle or nickname
• Channels - Channels, the virtual rooms where you login, stay active even when you are away. If you run your IRC client on a unix box, you even never need to log out, and you're able to read the conversation afterwards.
• Instant communication - Just like with google wave, an unlike to email, messages propagate immediately.
  
• Bot scripting - you can write bots that sit in an IRC channel, that respond to certain text comments, or events happening in the channel.
• File Transfer - the DCC commands allow you to send and receive files. Combined with the previous features, this means you can write bots that can send files on demand. Therefor, there is still a very lively scene of (illegal) filesharing on IRC.

Why would Google Wave, or one of it's applications have the ability to win the hearts of today's community of IRC addicts ?

Although IRC is not intended for collaboration, many users would appreciate better collaboration features and the possibilities to structure an interesting discussion. IRC logs give you a great overview of the dialogue, if you have the time to read through them and synthesize the content for yourself.

Wave Gadgets are "the next step" of gadget like robots, already existing in IRC. To name one examples, many channels run "quiz bots" who fire off questions and that are able to register responses, and more important, recognize who's FIRST. This type of INSTANT interactivity isn't possible in email. Although it is possible in platforms like facebook, you lose the anonimity there.

Because Wave Gadgets offer much richer forms of interaction, with regard to usability (see the chess or sudoku demo), while *probably* enabling you to keep the anonimity, there might be something really valuable for today's IRC users.

A big limitation on IRC is that once typed, there's no way of modifying sent messages. You are only able to send out new messages that are propagated (and duplicated) to all the users in the channel. It's also impossible to link to something said earlier in there.
Maybe this stuff is beyond the scope of IRC: if you're talking to someone, it's not possible to rewind to some of your earlier words, and change stuff. It would be interesting to hear of today's IRC users have a need for this type of editing and manipulation of the propagated info.

Verdict

Many people have made the mistake to predict the death of IRC. I'm convinced that the wave protocol offers enough potential to get some hardcore IRC users really enthusiastic. They will probably be among the first ones themselves to experiment with Wave, and amaze us with new quiz gadgets and IRC like functionality.

/quit (see you in the Wave)

Google Wave opportunities for Institutional Repositories

Institutional Repositories are web based information systems, used in higher education institutions and (digital) libraries to expose valuable content online. In a simplified way, you could consider them content management applications, with very specific usecases for digital preservation, and metadata-editing workflows.

Unique in the landscape of Institutional Repositories (IR's), is the dominance of Open Source platforms, even though these systems have strategic importance for institutions running them (for example DSpace @ MIT).

Can Google Wave solve problems in the area of IR's ?

The current state of the art IR's face important issues. I believe Google Wave offers important opportunities to at least optimize following issues:

Lack of voluntary deposits from (scientific) faculty

If there is a lack of deposits, this often relates to policy (if no one is obligated to deposit) or marketing (if no one knows about the repository) issues. However, it's still also very much related with usability and the required effort from the submitter.
Google Wave can mean a big step forward for deposit-usability.

Let's say a scientist just finishes writing a new pre print, that he'd (or she) like to deposit to the repository of his institution. He opens up a new wave, and adds the institutional repository bot, a bot intended to communicate with the repository on a wave. Because the bot and the scientist have authenticated with each other at some point in the past, this is already a huge leap forward: no more repository specific authentication.

The bot gives him a range of interaction possibilities, and the scientist chooses new submission (in the demo, it was already clear that interaction through forms, would be possible in Wave). When he drags his file into the wave, he can submit it to the repository, and add some metadata. Real clever IR bots will also be able to generate metadata automatically from the document, even maybe extract a full list of references, made in the document.

You probably get the point now about submitters, interacting with the repository bot from within the wave. The information could also come the other way, when a scientist is on a wave, together with the bot, with the sole purpose of knowing what's going on in the repository. Maybe he wants to get notified about new items in the repository, with similar keywords of the ones he used in his submissions ? Or maybe he wants a daily update on the download stats of his items ?

Ok, fair enough, a lot of this last stuff could also be implemented more or less with email, but the fact that the bot can continuously update the same wave, will make it much more efficient to synthesize information, and will make it go a lot FASTER.

Workflow optimization

In the Institutional Repository DSpace, one or more people can be responsible for checking, and extending the (meta)data for new submissions. If a collection receives a lot of submissions, theses metadata editors can become a bottle neck if tasks are piling up. If there are multiple metadata editors for a collection, a new submission arrives in a pool. From this pool, one of the editors has to "claim" the task, and do the editing.

Task pools and claiming will not be required anymore.

Let's say a new submission arrives, in a collection that has two metadata editors, Mary and Jane. The IR bot will start a new wave, and add Mary and Jane. Mary and Jane always have the same view on the data and the current state of the submission. Instead of having to claim the task, they can just work concurrently on the metadata editing, and push it further through the workflow. Jane can check the spelling of the abstract, while Mary checks the copyright status of the journal where the paper is published.

If you are a repository administrator, funder, submitter or visitor ... you've got a reason to be enthusiastic about Google Wave.

Google Wave compared to SIP and XMPP

Michael Morisy compares the potential of Google Wave to "unify" communications to enterprise favorites such as Cisco Webex, and adopted standards such as SIP for telephone and XMPP for messaging.

The post states that: While these open technologies have proliferated and even penetrated the enterprise market, few have offered the flexibility, interoperability, real-time and open source that Google Wave promises. XMPP is an IM protocol with some extensions, and SIP is a voice protocol with some extensions. Google Wave lacks a clear central application; instead, it enables or transforms any number of existing communication methods.

Maybe it lacks a clear central application ... for now. Before the web was invented, the internet lacked a clear central application as well. By creating the hype and the enthusiasm worldwide, armies of developers and conceptual thinkers are planting the seeds for great applications. Sure, Wave will have no trouble winning over thousands of early adopters. However, in order to move millions, the real killer functionality will need to encompass a dramatic optimization for a large, mainstream audience. And that audience needs to be ready for it as well.

Can Google Wave increase email productivity ?

Most people will agree that productivity gains could be reached by optimizing the way we handle email. However, a great deal of optimization is already possible today with tools in our current email clients, such as Gmail. In some cases, lack of knowledge of these tools or discipline lie at the cause of many email annoyances.

It looks like following real problem, that currently can't be tackled with Gmail//email, can be solved with Google Wave.

Tackling management of one-way updates, such as newsletters

The way you can manage a newsletter with GMail is to create a filter, enabling you to make the message skip the inbox. The problem consists of the fact that all the messages are sitting under the filter, as unrelated, atomic items. But because these messages are newsletters from the same organization, it's highly likely that their content will be related.

Let's imagine that you will keep receiving plain email newsletters, once you are using wave. If your wave client allows you to channel all the incoming newsletters in the same wave, you can include a robot or gadget to do certain tasks for you. It could start archiving and processing older newsletters, and present their combined content in a much more accessible way. For example a tag cloud, or a searchable index.

Taking one step further, when newsletters won't get sent out in plain email anymore, but are created as waves, the whole concept of newsletter can be redefined. The wave, sitting in your email client could be a live updated list of top5 newest items on the source site, or 5 most popular items.

In any case, we might be able to get rid of recurring, individual email messages, just because it doesn't require an individual message to update the wave, and bring new content to your attention.

To be continued by how Wave can tackle the Ever Growing Inbox