Google Wave Productivity

Are you receiving tens of emails a day?
These emails are most of the time a discussion of one precise subject; however you get this discussion in some sort of scattered rarely organized chunks.

Imagine you are planning an outdoor picnic with a group of friends on the weekend. I am quite sure that you will be emailing each other for the whole week. You will start by suggesting the day, the hour, the place, the type of food, the people you want them to join in and so forth…Naturally, every friend of yours has his own ideas and his own suggestions. Just take the four or five topics mentioned earlier and multiply them by the number of friends in the group; you will directly discover the amount of emails you will get just while trying to organize this picnic.

Now consider that you have at least two other subjects you need to take care of via email exchange and look what will happen to your inbox! With all the mess that you experience you can be sure that it has taken too long before someone is trying to bring a solution. What is needed is to put some order into this counter-productive technology that is called email.

Since most, if not all, email exchanges are centered on discussions; why not organize these discussions into threads? The idea is not new, ListServers existed for years, then later replaced by web forums. In those tools each discussion has its own thread and every participant will post his own opinion in the correspondent thread. The only problem with these services is they are public and not private. You can’t go organize or evoke personal stuff there. What is needed is something like your own personal discussion service that lets you create and conduct private discussions.

Until the creation of Google Wave this has been difficult to find. So you guessed it, Google Wave is primarily about communication and collaboration but instead of doing that using tens of scattered emails that pollute your inbox and make your life miserable, Google Wave will let you sort all this mess into a reduced number of discussions that are easily manageable and searchable.

Now let’s go back to our picnic project, instead of having tens of emails related to this subject, all you will have is one discussion in which every participant will post his opinion and at the end you will be able to easily find your way to carry on with this project.

May be Google Wave won’t replace emails in the near future simply because bad habits do not vanish easily. However I believe that people will start using it as the time goes on, especially when they realize how effective it is in handling their communication. It is also up to Google to make efforts towards providing consistent offers for businesses.