I only just discovered Google Wave this week. I have been looking high and low for an intuitive interface for group editing, on a multi-media platform that can compile all documents, comments, and updates into a single location. This kind of platform is long overdue, and soon I had hoped to use this in the classroom with my students (I teach English 101,201,102 in a University). When it comes to compiling notes, agendas, and gathering all information into a single location, google wave is years beyond Microsoft Word's capabilities. Cognitively, these days I think in web-pages who embed and inter-link data, rather than nest discrete files into folders. It's time the platform of web-browsing were distributed for the COMPOSITION of information, not just for specialists pedestrian consumption of data.
If Google doesn't save this platform, I urge any programmers reading this message to make one like it as fast as you can. It is THE breakthrough needed, given the multiplication of interfaces to have exploded in the last few years (apple's new logo-based logic, windows, osx, the google mashup, etc.). The nested-folder logic of both email and desktop organization is not sustainable for much longer, because there is no way to inter-link and centralize multi-modal data exceeding 100gb of space. Any given folder on my desktop might have discrete files like: a .pdf here, a .doc there, a .jpeg, maybe a spreadsheet. Websites are reserved for your bookmarks in another browser. An app for to-do's, an app for my calendar, an app for synchronizing the two. Look on your phone for contacts. Use skype to video-conference, but gchat to exchange links--I've used computers to work in research institutions for years, and as the decades accumulate, the nesting folder/discrete media/program mode has become unwieldy. Take a page from the Library of Congress: As the archive expands over the decades to reach critical mass, the filing system designed to fill a single room will simply not support a lifetime of production mediated through a Dewey Decimal vision of domesticated computing. I refuse to learn one more new grammar for the simple recording and transaction of information. It's commonplace that the next major computing effort will focus on hybridization, not fragmentation or invention. And public anxiety requesting such hybridization is only evidence that Google isn't doing way with Wave because it's not helpful, but because it is THE next step for computing as a whole. Cut this time-release scheme off at the pass, and make your money while you can. Give the public what it needs or be the next MySpace!
