Before I go any further, I want make one thing clear having been glued to Wave all day: I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration.  The thing is, it’s too far ahead of it’s time, and that’s what will hold it back from large-scale mainstream penetration, which is why Outlook is safe. For now.

I don’t want to add to the blogosphere’s echo-chamber with my own review of the hows, whys and wherefores, so instead:

• For a good taster of the technology behind Wave, I’d recommend taking a look at this article,
• If you’re after more in-depth info, straight from horse’s mouth, then the Wave developer wiki is the place to go.
• And, for a good example of how forward thinking organisations like SAP are already looking to leverage the collaborative power of Wave, take a look at the video embedded at the bottom of this post.

Again, let me be clear: I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration. The interface looks just like Gmail, except it feels slicker; this might have something to do with the Google Web-Kit front-end, but I’ll leave smarter people than me to comment on that. By way of a quick fly-by, you get your folders on the top-left, contacts on the bottom left; Inbox in the middle column; Active message (“wave”, in parlance) in the right-hand pane. New waves (messages) appear in your Inbox, just like any other email program, except, when you look closely, they’re changing. All the time.

The unread message count (circled in red) is incrementing, and new text creeps across the subtitle of the waves.

This indicates changes, made in realtime, to that wave; or new “blips” (new conversation strands) being added. Realtime, on-the-fly collaboration is quite something to watch – updates, edits and annotations appearing and changing as quickly as you can visually process them. The power of this platform hits you like a, well, like a wave crashing against the shore. Once more, lest you forget my feelings, I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration.

Ok; it looks nice; it’s feature rich and it’s generally pretty darn cool. So, why do I say Outlook is safe for a while?

I’m reasonably attuned to dealing with a realtime feed (thanks to Friendfeed), but even now there are times when I do need to hit the pause button. If I take off my rose-coloured, early-adopter geek glasses for a moment, and, instead, put on my “project manager with too many projects” glasses or my “HR advisor in the middle of a round of mass redundancies” glasses, imagining the volume of data that “regular” users are expected to act upon every day, Wave turns into a tidal surge.

Although it’s been described as email on steroids, I actually think Wave falls short right now. It’s too noisy. Where Wave does land some heavy punches is against Sharepoint – which, by the way, is a great product, if so-called implementors would take the time to refine it beyond its out-of-the-box install – creating FAQs, procedures and wiki-like pages was never, easier, more dynamic, or downright fun.

However, if I were to introduce Wave to a “regular” business with regular users as a replacement for Outlook today, those users would Freak Out. Look at today’s version of Outlook – it gives those stressed-out users the tools to control their Inbox; they can prioritise their actions and activities based on keywords, filters and search terms. (Once more, I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration.) With Wave, I can’t do that; it all pours in. What’s lacking at the moment is control and filtering of the of the incoming feed.

Yes; I understand that Wave is a preview right now, but, Wave was introduced to the world as “email, invented today”, and as such, it needs to demonstrate to decision makers in “regular” businesses that it can live up to that promise.

One last time, I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration but until Wave can give users the same sense of control, management and prioritization of their Inbox that Outlook does, I reckon Outlook is safe; but not for long.

(Footnote – my grateful thanks to Steven Hodson, whose recent post, inspired my use of the “emboldened point emphasis” in this article)

Until Twitter I was only half alive! I only lived my life – now I share in loads of people’s lives. Seeing other perspectives – like reading hundreds of short novels every day. On the downside I haven’t done any work for weeks.

I just love the image created by the notion that each “Tweet” is a short novel. When explaining to people why I like Twitter, I’ve found that rather than try and verbalise what it’s about, it’s better to grab them by the scruff of the neck and shove them face first into the stream of consciousness that is Twittervision. It is, literally, like reading other peoples thoughts.

[tags]Twitter, Twittervision, Jaiku, microblog, microblogging[/tags]

I’ve got to honest here; if the link had been “in the full”, I probably wouldn’t have clicked through – I would have reckoned on it being more mainstream-media-sanitised, “See it’s not all that bad, is it?” reporting but a) it was linked by Chris, and b) it was in TinyURL format. As it turned out, I clicked through into Episode 1, and was hooked.

Hometown Baghdad is an honest, no-frills, but all-too-brief glimpse into the everyday life of a group of everyday Iraqi twentysomethings who have had their lives interrupted by the war.

As with the previous episodes, the latest from Hometown Baghdad, “Symphony of Bullets“, is both moving and uplifting; moving because of the sense of what now passes for normal life in Baghdad; uplifting because despite the gunfire, humour still shines through.

I try not to blog about politics here – it’s too easy for things to dissolve into a “push me; shove you” argument – but maybe its time for the world’s media to pull out of Iraq, and let normal Iraqis tell their own stories. Perhaps one day, the coalition soldiers will simply have nothing left to do.In the meantime, if you subscribe to one new blog today, make it this one.

[tags]Iraq, Hometown Baghdad, video[/tags]

“Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging….

It’s something that every beginning-blogger reads about, and something that I wrestled with when I started this blog. I spent countless hours scouring the net for news about which I felt my comments would add value, or at the very least, a different perspective, worrying that if I didn’t post something every day, I would eventually lose interest in my own blog.

It didn’t take me long to realise that it actually didn’t matter. In my view, there’s no point in creating noise for the sake of it, but that’s exactly what many high-profile bloggers seem to do. I don’t need to name and shame – I’m sure they appear in your RSS feeds, just as they do in mine – but ask yourself this: when catching up on your headlines, how often are you picking certain feeds and doing a “select all; mark as read”?

I haven’t been blogging for long at all; and my blog is hardly a “must subscribe to” in the scheme of the blogosphere, but reading through Eric’s 10-point list, I sympathise with each point he makes. I’m sure there’s an old adage about not speaking unless you’ve actually got something to contribute, and that’s the position I’ve taken with my posts here.

I’ve seen a couple of articles like Eric’s appearing lately, but none have put it so succinctly. Let’s hope the noise-makers in the blogosphere are reading too….

[tags]blog, blogging, posts, conversations, posting, frequency[/tags]

We’ve seen bloggers making posts about presentations and keynotes as they happen before, but the interesting slant on this is that Keiren McCarthy from The Register will be there, trawling the blogosphere for blog posts about the meeting, tagged with “igf”, as they occur and feed the interesting ones back into the meeting in real time. I haven’t heard of this technique being used before, and certainly not being used at such a forum.

The output from the meeting will feed into the Internet Governance Fourm being held in Athens at the end of the month, so this represents a great opportunity for bloggers passionate about the future of the net to make their voices heard during a meeting of academics, business people and politicians as if they themselves were in the audience.

Of course, it depends on Kieren’s editorial control in making sure that the “right” blog posts are bought to the attention of the panel, but it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. 

Really? Perhaps Mr Waterhouse has never come across a Trackback before; perhaps he is unfamiliar with the kind of link-love that feeds sites like Technorati and Techmeme.

Or perhaps it’s simply that he feels the great unwashed masses have no business sharing thoughts and ideas with the world, while the kind of publication he writes for tries to survive by pushing its policital virtiol  and “news” about d-lebrities on an ever-decreasing readership.

Ashley Norris, whose article on this subject caught my attention, nails it perfectly when he says,  ”Ultimately, with Keith, it boils down to the fact that the number of people who are interested in his tablets delivered from on high, is dwindling.”