Creator and lead developer of Gmail and Founder of FriendFeed,Paul Buchheit responds to the recent article “Gmail Creator Thinks Email Will Last Forever. And Hasn’t Tried Google Wave.” on TechCrunch.
After being quoted “Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” and admitting that the Google Wave invite is sitting in his inbox Paul Buchheit’s stance was deemed a significant blow to the hype of Google Wave on TechCrunch . However, Paul has issued a far more levelheaded response on his blog yesterday, which sees Wave integrating with Gmail and puts things into perspective.
Here are his thoughts on Wave:
First off, Wave is clever and full of interesting ideas.
Second, comparisons to Facebook and Twitter are nonsensical. If Twitter were CNN Headline News, Google Wave would be Microsoft Office. Wave is less of a social network and more of a productivity tool. It’s Google Docs meets Gmail, or as Google puts it, “A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”
Third, although Wave is very promising, it’s clear that it still needs some refinement. This is why Google calls it a “preview release”. The trouble with innovative new ideas is that not all of them are worth keeping. [...] It’s my impression that Wave was released at an earlier stage of development — they included all of the features, and will likely winnow and refine them as Wave approaches a full launch. The Wave approach can be a little confusing, but it allows for greater public feedback and testing.
Paul is right in that Wave is massively hyped at the moment, that the preview release with its developer invites makes it incredibly exclusive and that once you’ve tried Wave it impresses and confuses people at the same time. You just need to look at the Twitter trend “Google Wave” to see the landscape out there. Half of the tweets are desperate to finally get an invite and the other half is asking what the fuss was about now they have one and want to know what to do with it.
It’s very early days to speak of the replacement of Email, but it’s good that Google lets developers share & shape a bit of the Wave and where it could get to. Jens and Lars Rasmussen actively encourage our participation and ask: “So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else can we do with this? “ in their Google Wave announcement on the official Google Blog.
On the question whether Wave would kill Email, Paul’s answer is frank, but with a compromising future:
So now that I’ve tried Wave, do I expect it to kill email? No. The reason that nothing is going to kill email anytime soon is quite simple: email is universal (or as close to it as anything on the Internet). Email has all kinds of problems and I often hate it, but the fact is that it mostly works, and there’s a huge amount of experience and infrastructure supporting it. The best we can do is to use email less, and tools like Wave and Docs are a big help here.
Paul suggests the future could bring static HTML and Wave versions of messages together, which could open up in the appropriate format and link to one another depending on the mail reader. Combining chronological email threats with real time Waves is an interesting thought, and given his track record, Paul is probably not far off the mark.
Read Paul Buchheit’s full statement and review of his Google Wave test and how he responds to the remarks of him not having even tried Wave in TechCrunch in his post:
So I finally tried Wave…
Further articles mentioned in this post:
