On Google Wave – Part 2: Unified Messaging

Continued from part 1: architecture.

Theories and implementations of unified messaging are probably as old as the Internet itself. The basic problem that unified messaging is trying to solve is this: send any type of content to any user regardless of which software they run or what platform they are on.

How Google Wave approaches unified messaging actually both clarifies and complicates unified messaging. The Google Wave team has correctly identified two crucial properties of unified messaging:

1. Certain types of content impose certain kinds of interactions and communication. The P2P communication paradigm for example is inherently part of instant messaging content.
2. Content types are characterized by our shared internal articulations rather than its technical characteristics. Content is a social object.

The Google Wave team has started from these two assumptions and has selected a federated P2P architecture as the default communication paradigm for all content. As mentioned in the architecture post, content is instantly distributed across the shared memory space which a wave represents.

Whether you’re writing an article, a traditional e-mail message, a report, or are just chatting away to coordinate your activities with others it’s ultimately up to the participants in the wave to determine how the content will evolve. Will it end up in discussion, chatting, link sharing, video or picture sharing, instant messaging? It doesn’t matter and it can be all of the above.

In Google Wave the wave encapsulates unified messaging. Every addressee can instantly – and without requiring permission – become a co-author. The wave actually allows us to discover and explore the social objects we have inside us and play with wave content in collaboration with others to enrich the exploration. This is the default mode of communication within Google Wave.

We will constantly be tuning in and out of wave collaboration and discover and share social objects as they emerge. Waves can go on for months or years. Content can be endlessly rewritten and re-organized. Participants can join and leave. And all of that happens in real-time with updates appearing as they happen, potentially originating on the other side of the world.

Collaborative editing on top of an associative memory architecture is relatively new. There exist online word processing tools today which already offer this but most of us aren’t using them. There will be a big uptake in this kind of content creation when Google Wave launches and we can only guess what will happen next. What’s certain is that Google Wave will cause a lot of disruption and emergence.

A critical characteristic of Google Wave’s unified messaging feature is that it will soon be possible to add any kind of content – discussions, chatting, picture and videos, links, data, … – to any kind of information. Do you have an incoming invoice which you can’t make sense of? Just push it into a new wave, add addressees and engage in any kind of collaboration using any kind of content until the answer is found. And do all of that on the record.

It will ultimately be possible to add any kind of information to waves, including existing records in databases coming from sales or procurement processes or any other process. We will be able to slap any kind of content and collaboration on to these records in the form of a wave. For each important record a wave could be created automatically, just like each Wikipedia article automatically has a discussion page. We could even choose to update these records from inside a wave after a consensus in reached. The limits of what we can or are allowed to do will be determined by how flexible our old ways of organizing are. What would happen if every incoming customer complaint would be transformed into a wave?

In this perspective I think Google Wave has really nailed unified messaging to a degree that we haven’t seen before. In fact, we’ll soon all get very busy trying to integrate our existing systems into Google Wave in order to increase our productivity. Google Wave will likely start an arms race in many industries to integrate as much existing information and processes as possible into Wave’s unified messaging, simply because we’ll all realize that not doing so will be a loosing strategy.

This line of thought screams for a roundup of how Google Wave can be extended which is the topic of the next post.