Fictions
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Google Wave
- posted by Ron @ 2:15 AM 0 comments 
Since hearing about the Google Wave product, even from what little I know of a Wave my mind has been leaping with ideas about its potential in all sorts of applications. Whether an email, text, tweet, or web post, I think to myself, "This would be so much better as a Wave."
I should back up and explain. A Wave is/will be a communication tool that will be released to the public later in 2009. Since this type of thing is so much more than anything we have ever encountered before, I hope I can explain what a Wave is and give it the justice it deserves. Once it comes out, I can imagine all of us Waving to each other. A Wave can be thought of as a single Email conversation that sits on the internet, and everyone involved in that conversation can access it. This is very different from standard Email in some significant ways.
- First, an Email gets sent as several copies to recipients. You have a copy in your "Sent" folder. Your recipients have their own copies in their "Inbox". By comparison, a Wave creates only one copy that can be seen by all your recipients. No extra copies are made or needed, because everyone sees the same Wave.
- Second, once you send an Email, you cannot make changes to it. The email you sent is then essentially unchanging document out of your control. A Wave can be changed by you after you "send" it. Everyone of your recipients will instantly see any of the changes you have made to the Wave. You don't have to resend it, because everyone of your recipients can see it.
- Third, when you want to pass along an Email to even more recipients, your Email then needs to be Forwarded to other recipients, thereby creating more copies of the Email. A Wave has only one instance and no copies. When you want to "send" it to others, you simply add them to the recipient list.
- Fourth, replying to an email creates a new email that sometimes has some or an entire copy of the original email. A replay in a Wave becomes part of the Wave, and
- Fifth, a Wave can do other things that an Email cannot. New recipients will be able to see the original Wave through the final Wave by utilizing a "playback" feature that shows you the changes that took place as the Wave unfolded. Your recipients can edit your Wave, reply to only portions of your wave, add photos to your Wave, and add functionality such as instant language translation while you type.
Wave will enter our consciousness and broaden our understanding of communication. Our perception of a Wave will change as we interact with it. What starts out as an email type Wave can quickly transform into a useful document or a polling place for a gathering. At its core, a Wave is a document that is ready to be shared as an email, a blog post, an instant messaging chat session, or team project. In fact, when you create a Wave and then add recipients, the team of people you include in the Wave can and will add to the Wave to communicate with you and each other at the same time.
This Wave thing is going to be more like a Tsunami big enough to hit every shore on the planet.
- posted by Ron @ 2:15 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Wasting time, money, and resources on a broken postal system
- posted by Ron @ 11:20 AM 0 comments
How much sense does it make to send something through the mail, have it travel a few hundred miles, get to its destination, only to be refused because it is 2 cents short of the "new" standard postage rate, and travel a few hundred more miles back to the original sender for no extra charge?
We need a different system.
- posted by Ron @ 11:20 AM 0 comments
