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Google Wave doesn't stop information overload
Google Wave is too complex, says Farhad Manjoo at Slate:
it's not immediately clear why you should take the time to learn all this stuff. ...waves with multiple people can get just as messy as a wild e-mail threads--more than a few I took part in devolved into chaos. ... In the same way, Wave does nothing for e-mail overload. In just the few days I've had an account, I've already started getting roped into long chains of messages with people I didn't know. Were Wave to become as popular as e-mail, it would surely succumb to the same noise that now crowds our inboxes.
The solution to overload isn't primarily Google Wave or any other tool, because technology isn't the primary reason for overload. Tools are essential, but overload is primarily a behavioral problem: on the sending side people aren't writing clearly or acting with empathy for the people they email to; on the receiving side, people haven't been trained to spend five minutes a day emptying their inbox and sending action items to a todo list.
Send this man (and Google engineers) Bit Literacy! Or at least try out Gootodo - a simple tool that really does address overload.
Look, Wave is awesome, but it's just not cooked yet. If you are not a serious nerd, don't even try it for a while.
Once it's great, and worthwhile for non-technical people, I'll let you know here:
http://www.examiner.com/x-25758-Google-Wave-Examiner
I agree with your sentiments on overload, Mark, but what's to be done when the incoming volume is such that getting to empty becomes a multi-hour task in itself? Should we use systems like Seriosity to help others become bit literate - http://www.seriosity.com ?
No kidding - love the suggestion that Google engineers and Bit Literacy would be a good marriage!
And since every customer experience starts with a real person who has a real need or desire they'd pay money to solve...I have been wondering just exactly what Wave is out to solve - and for whom. Addressing overload for people who live their lives online? Real time collaboration for geeks?
Here's a great post that extends/compliments this Wave conversation: http://www.ceforprofit.com/
Seems like Google has two challenges: get clear about the problem they're solving, and use that decision to define the appropriate experience design for Wave. What do you think?
Getting to empty should only take a few minutes a day. Certainly shouldn't be a multi-hour task. If it's taking that long, something's wrong - have someone drop me a note - or just read "Bit Literacy" :)
"to learn and practice" - there's the rub! No one expects to learn OR practice to act in the online space... or maybe anywhere else. Hence, you make the same mistakes every time you do something that you don't do often.
In the end, as one of those posting comments said, users will manage better when it's "cooked".
Back in the mid-1990s, Dr Candice Harp identified "Winging it" as the primary way people choose to learn technology... and has anything changed since then. Not from my observation.
I don't think Wave is even an attempt to solve information overload. It's even more complicated than serial communication or even threaded e-mail because it can not only branch at any point in the dialogue, but what has already been written can be changed or deleted.
This means that the replay feature is not simply an interesting tool to help you browse the dialogue; it's actually an additional, essential dimension of the dialogue.
Unless your wave makes a conscious decision to rein themselves in, the dialogue can easily become more complicated than the brain is even wired for.
My guess is that it's an attempt to organize and allow a *richer* dialogue, but one in which information overload was not even really thought out.
>> In the same way, Wave does nothing for e-mail overload
Who said that it would?
I think I am the one who implied that Wave would do nothing for e-mail overload.
It won't for people who have a problem that is not e-mail related, but life-related, which is to say they just have lots of people who need something from them. For those people reading Mark's book is the answer. Mark may be able to write a new chapter for the next addition about Wave, but the principles will be the same.
Where Wave will help is for any kind of email that either has attachments that go back and forth, or for any email that goes to more than one person.
People within Wave will still need to follow Mark's ideas, but they will have tools better designed for communication and collaboration among more than two people.