That paradigm shift? Yeah, it's coming
Recently I wrote Why Email Clients Need to Change which was a commentary on a post by the same name on gigaom. The gist of the post is that we are on the verge of a paradigm shift in personal information management, driven by the explosion of user generated content about which we care (ours and others). Managing all this information with our current application technology is untenable. Email clients, blogs, twitter, and so on, in their current form, won't cut it. As ever more of our life is brought into the digital world, we will have better ways to deal with and organize this information.
As an example of the general problem, consider a well known problems with email. Email works well with linear conversations, but generally falls down when it comes to handling more realistic conversations, which tend to branch. For example, there is no good way to reply to just a specific part of a long email. We've made up conventions to do this which work well for short-lived threads, but these conventions quickly become a problem in long-lived threads where an email can be turned into incomprehensible alphabet soup (especially for those who are included in the conversation late in its life).
Also, consider an application which has recently had a lot of attention on the Internet: collaborative editing. Despite the upturn of good online collaborative editors, this is an application which is largely untapped by general users. I believe there are three major reasons why this is so. First, it simply has not yet become well known that this technology is readily available to us now (i.e. it has not crossed the gap). Second, the reason it has not crossed the gap is that the technology has not yet propagated to the most heavily used authoring applications, such as popular desktop word processors (and email clients. Confused about why you might want to collaborate on an email? read on and check out the video below). Finally, we've grown accustomed to working without the ability to collaborate at this level (i.e. simultaneously) for so long that the potential of collaboration is not yet realized by most users. Integration of online collaboration into a major application with a large audience is what is needed to bring it to the next stage (of course).
Google Wave looks like it may make a very large dent in these two areas, and many more. Rather than try to describe it, please take a look at the demo video from Google I/O where Google Wave was introduced a few days ago:
The video is a bit long, but until a more condensed version comes out this is the best we've got. I'll be commenting a lot more on Google Wave in as time goes on, including some notes on how it solves various communication problems, but for now just watch and enjoy :)
