The one we’d all been waiting for – ever since the Rasmussen brothers announced Wave at Google I/O in May, we’ve been waiting for some hard examples of the power that Wave can bring. Gregory D’Alesandre (Dr Wave), Product Manager for Google Wave ran presented three examples of Wave integrations from Novell, ThoughtWorks and SAP.

Every time you use any sort of communication technology you’re trying to achieve a goal, to get something done. With Google Wave the idea is that rather than understanding the “end goal”, users can start a Wave which can conform with the shifting objectives over time. D’Alesandre gave an introduction to Wave for the one or two people in the audience who haven’t seen it before. He explained that Google use Wave internally a lot and they find that all current communication technologies are a poor replacement for face to face interactions however every now and ten it’s better to interact electronically (he gave the example of a 12 person meeting with everyone trying to talk at the same time) – Wave enables this mass interaction without so much noise (although I’d have to say it does introduce significant dissonance as heavy users of multiple person IM will know).

The Wave team has purposely avoided giving lots of lock-down options to Wave – if you allow people to lock their content down, Wave becomes very email-like – openness and flexibility increases the collaborative potential.

D’Alesandre talked about Wave as a platform and invited their platform partners to show their offerings.

First up Alexander Dreiling, Program Manager from SAP who demoed two gadgets that SAP has built – Gravity is a gadget that allows business process modeling to be collaboratively built. See the demo video below;

Second up, Chad Wathington, VP, Product Development, ThoughtWorks demoed the integration of Wave with a software development project management tool. I covered the offering in more depth in another post but basically it allows for tasks to be created relating to a project all from within Wave and have them reflected in the project management tool. As I said in my post – this integration doesn’t show much more than could be achieved with a standard email/PM integration.

And lastly Andy Fox, Vice President Engineering from Novell showed their integration using the Wave federation protocol – Pulse. Pulse aggregates multi channel communication as well as a list of relevant contacts – it’s effectively a social CRM/communication offering. It brought to mind Gist’s offering and, while it helps aggregate lots of data, it does little to ease the burden of the firehose of information. The addition it does bring is the enablement of visibility in real time – but it does raise some question as to the value of asynchronous vs synchronous communications.

Some interesting integrations… but yet again nothing entirely ground breaking.

There has been a great deal of discussion about email recently. I think the proximate cause is the arrival of Google Wave, which is being heralded like the coronation of royalty. (I will leave a review of Wave to another venue, since the introductory video from Google is 85 minutes.) But the rise of tools like Twitter have also raised questions about the future state for email.

A few years ago, in 2004 or 2005, I was chairing a panel at Supernova on ‘The Future Of Email’. JP Rangaswami was there, as was a fellow from some email spam prevention company. I got in hot water immediately buy making the following arguments:

1. Email is not really well-designed relative to its ostensible purpose — which is to support communication between people that are well-known to each other, and have an on-going relationship, for example working on a project together within a company.
2. Email is very good at things that seem like spam: sending unsolicited and perhaps unwanted messages to people that are unknonw aside from their email address. The basic protocols of store-and-forwarding of email means that email can be filtered into spam folders, but it basically has to be delivered.
3. The adoption of instant messaging and chat products in business have been shown to decrease email and telephone communications by a sizable extent, sometimes as much as 30% or more. This suggest that features of these technologies — like persistent chat rooms, and instant message presence — offer real benefits that can’t be supported by telephone and email communication.
4. Lastly, there is a strong generational gradient away from email: teenagers and young people dislike it, and view it as a corporate tool that they only use to talk to companies, and never with their friends, with whom they are most likely to text or talk on the phone.

I suggested that the logical outcome of these trends was the eventual death of email, which would like follow some sort of S-curve, as people began to defect from it, and transition onto existing and as-then-unknown alternatives.

I was almost tarred and feathered. People were literally yelling at me, saying I was an idiot. Esther Dyson shook her head at me from the front row. Amy Wohl asked if I was unaware that email was the killer app of the Internet. Someone demanded his money back for the confernece, since he was interested in hearing of the future of email, not about some future in which email was no more.

But, now years later, with the aging of the boomers who consider email as an integral and eternal part of the web, the increased use of text, instant messaging, VoIP, and now microstreaming solutions like Twitter, my five year old pronouncements look like something from the sunday supplement of a newspaper. Like the recent piece in the WSJ by Jessica Vascellaro called Why Email No Longer Rules….

Vascellaro gets off to a good start:

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

But she stumbles and falls when she reverts to industrial era notions about personal productivity as the rationale for why we select different media to communicate, with the unexamined premise that we always choose what we do in order to be more productive:

You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn’t meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

So, five years after a time when talking about the death of email was seen as a subversive act, something like burning the flag, Vascellano fails to actually connect the real dots here. She holds to an old yardstick, where productivity trumps everything. However, in the new world of social tools connecting us, being connected to others trumps everything.

So we are slowly starving email, relegating it to a shorter and short list of appropriate uses. In time, it will fall off the edge, like fax is now that we can scan and send attachments more easily than using dedicated fax machines. We will find that email will be left with a short list of uses, like monthly mailing from the bank, or travel intineraries from Expedia. These relative impersonal communications with companies will be the final resting ground for email, and then, even that will wink out when a better metaphor for social interaction with companies becomes dominant.

And I doubt that we will miss it when it’s gone, either.

Luis Suarez, IBM Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist keynoting at Web 2.0 Expo Europe, Berlin 2008.

Let’s free ourselves from the email grip! Use social tools for more efficient knowledge sharing.

See link for NY Times article titled I Freed Myself From E-mail’s Grip:

Google today announced voice and video chat capabilities as part of its chat service embedded into Gmail. This is clearly a shot across the bow at Skype, SightSpeed (recently acquired by Logitech) and Oovoo. It’s also a competitive move against Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, as Google continues to evolve it’s mail application into a full blown UC dashboard.

Google’s move is also indicative of what we’re seeing in the enterprise space, as telephony vendors and messaging vendors converge while basing their UC offerings on their relative strengths. Google’s voice/video chat nicely integrates into Gmail, enabling customers to use their Gmail contact list for chat, rather than having to maintain separate buddy lists in different applications. Now, how long before Google repositions Orkut as an alternative to Facebook that is fully integrated into Gmail & chat?

I’m sure more than once in the last few years you’ve heard a product or service pitch that promises to enable your users to move away from reliance on e-mail for collaboration. Yes we all know the drill. E-mail is cumbersome, there’s too much spam, not enough workflow management, and on and on. While collaboration applications such as wikis and shared workspaces are thriving, the reality is still that when it comes to collaboration, e-mail is still king no matter who rises up and attempts a coup.

Now, a new wave of collaboration vendors is emerging that are trying to fix e-mail rather than replace it. I had the chance this week to see a demo of C-Mail, a start-up that aims to improve e-mail efficiency by providing prioritization of incoming e-mails based on learned or pre-configured behavior, along with the ability to tie e-mail to work flows (similar functionality is available from Xobini and Clear Context). Perhaps we’re on the cusp of finally accepting the fact that e-mail isn’t going away any time soon, and instead the time has come to look at ways of improving the application we all use?

IBM announced Lotus iNotes this week, bringing Notes calendar, e-mail, and address book access to iPhone. It looks like this approach is based more on providing a stand-alone iPhone app rather than synching the iPhone’s own apps with Domino as is possible using Microsoft ActiveSync with Exchange. Still, this just knocked down another argument for using the iPhone in the corporate environment, especially when the cost of an iPhone is on par with most BlackBerry’s. But IT architects need to understand the impact on their server and network environments of enabling their remote users to sync directly with messaging servers versus using a hosted proxy in the RIM/Good models.

Cisco has announced this morning that it is buying PostPath, a maker of a Linux-based messaging & calendaring solution that competes directly with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino. Cisco notes that they will use this acquisition to build advanced capabilities into WebEx Connect’s SaaS-based services rather than offer PostPath as an on-premises solution.

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Steve’s comments below got me thinking about why we don’t just accept information overload, but actually ask for it.

There was plenty of chatter in the blogs this weekend over the decision by the Obama campaign to text its supporters news of the VP pick as soon as it happened (well, as soon as the campaign was ready to release it). Most of it seemed centered around (1) the timing of the text’s release (another 3am brouhaha), (2) the “next-gen Internet outreach” approach, and (3) the pick himself. Mainly lost in the discussion was whether anyone really needed to know the information in real time, on their cells and PDAs.

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I love the flexibility Enterprise 2.0 tools provide and have made it somewhat of a personal quest to find new ways to use these tools to make my job easier. But as I and my employer adopt new applications to help manage information, I find the number of tools and all the little pockets of information they generate to be a little unmanageable. Here’s why:

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The iPhone3G hit stores today, but of course you knew that already. iPhone3G is the device Apple touts as “The best phone for business. Ever” boasting a few new features that business users will need. The iPhone3G is, of course, a “3G” phone meaning it can access higher speed data networks from the wireless carriers. The new iPhone also supports Microsoft Exchange putting push email, calendar and contact information at your fingertips. The iPhone3G has a VPN client, WPA2 Enterprise and 802.1X authentication for business-grade security.

Of course the other big news from Apple is the opening of the App Store and the many 3rd-party apps being made available there. I did a scan of the applications surfacing for iPhone3G paying specific attention to apps that support the Enterprise 2.0 vision. Here’s what I found:

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