Fastblog do Marco Gomes

Google Wave 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 e-mail, the simple act of collaborating on a list can turn into a nightmare chain, crawling with indents and chevrons and worse. Wave keeps everything tidy.

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 is vintage Google: give away a product that does stuff your competitors charge money for, thereby burnishing your public image and, at the same time, sapping your competitors' will to live.

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 isn't always the most efficient way to work.