Word: wave
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Wave isn't actually an e-mail killer. In practice, it's more like an insanely rich IM client. E-mail is asynchronous; you can wait an hour or (if you are, like me, a bad person) a week to answer it. But because Wave operates in real time, it demands immediate attention like an IM or a phone call or, for that matter, a crying baby. When Wave is up, it's hard to focus on anything else. That isn't a defect, but it does narrow the scope of its usefulness. Getting more information right away...
...guess I should be grateful, since Google Wave is both free and pretty cool. Its main defect is that it's almost impossible to explain. Google spokespeople have described Wave as what e-mail would look like if it had been invented now instead of 40 years ago. (Fun fact: the first e-mail was sent in 1971 between two Digital PDP-10 computers.) Keep in mind that until the mid-1990s, when e-mail went mainstream, the network environment was very different. Bandwidth was a scarce resource. You had your poky modem and liked it. Which...
...Google Wave rips up that paradigm and embraces the power of the networked, collaborative, postpaper world. Waves aren't static; they're active and malleable. When you send out a wave, you create a virtual object shared by you and the person or people you send it to. You can type in it, and so can everybody else who's on the wave - it's stored on a central server instead of passed from PC to PC like e-mail. Everybody sees what everybody else is typing as they type it. Everybody can edit what everybody else writes. With regular...
...about just text. You can put pictures in a wave, plus richer, more dynamic stuff: movies, games, polls, maps. You can publish your wave to a blog. You can embed it in a website, where it retains its editable, collaborative waviness. And this is just beta stuff. Like everything else these days, Wave is a platform. Google is encouraging developers to write apps that will make waves do even more. (The full launch is expected in the first half of 2010 - though don't forget that Gmail spent five years in beta.) (See pictures of work and life at Google...
...Google Wave is, in short, a remarkably full-featured collaboration and communication tool, powerful enough for enterprise customers and easy enough for civilians. It's also a warning shot across the bow of pretty much every software company anywhere. It's amazing how many people's grills Google is getting up into with this single product. It's real time like AIM and Twitter (and it can talk to Twitter by importing and exporting tweets). It's social and shares media, like Facebook. Anybody who makes an e-mail client or collaboration software should be paying attention to Wave. This...