Email Renovated: Google Wave

I swear, I knew this would happen.

Ever since Google released Chrome, my cousin and I wondered if Google would release an email client. “No,” he said, “they’d never want to destroy Thunderbird.”

Indeed, they need not destroy Thunderbird, for Google as always is taking email to a new dimension.

The idea behind Wave is that instead of imitating snail mail, which is how email works, the focus is shifted to the message itself which all recipients can see at the same time. In other words, it’s a message focused tool instead of a recipient focused tool. And this makes a difference!

Let’s say you and I have the application open and you’re doing your own business. I start replying to an email – and you can see me type the email! This makes it even better than live chat since you don’t have to wait for me to type an essay, then I wait for you to read it.

But what sets is apart from a chat, other than live reading? Simple – you can go off any time and it would be regarded as email.

You can add a new person to the conversation by simply dragging and dropping the person! And just in case there are too many people and you don’t want a certain person to read a reply, you can reply privately to a person or group of people. Attachments are also drag and drop, with the thumbnails instantly appearing on the other end(s) before they upload.

It doesn’t stop there though, it goes further. You can “install” Wave on your website, and you can share an email (like photos) to the world, and the replies are instant and live. The API can be embedded to social sites too, so you can send an “email” to friends who you don’t necessarily have on you Wave account.

That’s not all. It could be used as a collaboration tool in a corportation, where everyone contributes in a single article, with markup edits available to everyone (no need for Word!), and best of all you can “replay” a conversation to see how it started and how everyone invested in it. Several groups can also add and merge to a master document, and if you’re in the workplace you know how much merging is difficult and often inconsistent. Several people can edit the Wave at the same time – with the edits being transfered live so you can see who is editing what.

The spell checker does not match the words to a dictionary, rather it reads the context of the sentence and understands what you’re trying to say!

Not to mention, it is open source and extensible!

There is so much more to the product… this is the future!