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>> Hi, I'm Rafe Needleman from CNET taking a first look
at Google Wave. Google Wave is a really interesting
rethink of e-mail from Google. It's a highly
experimental project and we got a look at the
developer's preview, and here's what Wave is. It's
realtime e-mail. What that means is that as you're
typing a message in Wave, either a new message or a
reply to one you got, the person you're writing to can
see what you're typing as you type it. Sounds weird,
doesn't it? You don't have to use Wave in this realtime
way. It also works as a standard e-mail app. What's
really different about Wave is that if you're replying
to a message and the person you're replying to happens
to be online at the same time and sees that their
message thread is getting updated they can jump into the
conversation at that point and change what was an e-mail
conversation into functionally an instant message
conversation or a chat. So here I am, for example,
writing a message to Steven Shanklin about Wave. I just
write it as a normal e-mail, but then he happens to come
online, write a response to me live. We have a little
dialogue. So it goes from an e-mail to a chat and then
to a collaborative editing where he starts putting
things into the document I originally wrote and I start
adding things back as well. Wave is really different,
and it really does change the way you look at e-mail.
You no longer see a message as a static thing, you write
differently knowing that your message can become an IM
at any moment. But here's the thing. It works. If
you're responding it a message and the other person
comes on line and wants to change that dialogue into a
realtime chat you can resolve whatever it is you were
discuss right then and clear the conversation from your
Inbox for good. Now Wave is about more than realtime
e-mail. It's also a new platform for messaging in which
all replies and conversations on a message happen in the
messages themselves. Not in the copies that are sent
all over the net as in regular e-mail. That means that
multiple recipients of a message can all have dialogues
in the message, and nobody will get out of sync. Now
everything that we've seen on Wave is experimental.
Many of the features in the developer's preview don't
work. And Wave isn't yet connected to other
communication systems like regular e-mail, which means
the only people I can Wave with as a user are other
people who are on Wave as well. So we don't yet know
what using Wave will be like once it gets crowded like
e-mail, and we haven't yet seen how Spammers will attack
it. Also, the technology behind Wave is far more
demanding on servers and on the Internet itself than
regular e-mail or chat. So we don't know how well the
technology about scale. But Wave really is a
contemporary rethink of e-mail. A lot of people won't
like it, a lot of people didn't like e-mail either when
it first showed up, or IM, or Facebook, or Twitter. But
people will find real uses for Wave and whatever it
becomes, and it's one of the most interesting new takes
on communications I've ever seen. When it comes out
later this year, give it a fair shake, even if you don't
like it. It will make you think differently about
e-mail. I'm Rafe Needleman from CNET, and this has been
a first look at Google Wave.
