CommVerged

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on the death of email today.  In Why Email No Longer Rules , Jessica E. Vascellaro explores why people are choosing instant messaging and social networking applications over email.  While explaining the benefits of these  communication tools, the article questions if we will be better or worse off with these new enhanced capabilities. 

We are now almost constantly connected to an endless, gushing stream of information about an ever expanding network of contacts.  Will we be able to process and control the increasing volume of information?  Will the effort to manage our communication tools make us slaves to the tools?  If so, the off button may be a feature we all need to use more often.

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The public preview of Google Wave  has created quite a buzz in the tech industry over the past few weeks days.  Some are predicting Wave will be a revolutionary communication tool that could make email obsolete.  Others think it will be the next global Social Networking phenomenon.  But some think it will be a complete failure.  Quite a wide range of opinions. 

If you are not familiar with Wave, Google describes it as “an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”  Gina Trapani  provides a better understanding of what that means in her lifehacker blog titled, Google Wave First Look.

I was not fortunate enough to get an invitation to participate in the public preview, so I have not had the opportunity to use and evaluate Wave first hand.  But after seeing several online demos and articles, it is easy to see that Wave is a very unique and powerful new converged communication tool.  I believe Wave will be a great communication and collaboration option for SoHo and Micro Office users that don’t have access to a full-fledged Unified Communication solution.  I plan on writing a dedicated blog on that later.  I also believe that Wave may become a very popular social networking application. 

I think social networking users will be attracted to the ability to start a wave on a specific subject with a specific group of people.  This seems more appealing than exposing all your online conversations to everyone in your online social network.  Most of us interact as friends with multiple groups of people from our family, school, work, church, civic organizations, neighborhood and social networks.   Combining individuals from all of these groups to create one group of friends for an online social network like Facebook can inhibit your conversations or cause unwanted issues.  A humorous exchange with one friend may not be appropriate for co-workers.  A political discussion with some of your friends may create tension with others in your network.  Creating separate Waves for these types of conversations that only include the appropriate participants seems like a better way to manage an online social network.  I also think the ability to respond directly and privately to individuals within a Wave is a great feature for social networking.  

Google will need to add some functionality to Wave before it can be effectively used for social networking.  For example, the creator of a wave will need to be able set user permissions and remove users from a wave if needed.  Even if these features and other required functionality is added, it is hard to predict how Wave will be adopted and used for social networking.  But it is easy to see the game-changing potential is there.

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I purchased a new Palm Pre this week, and I have been very impressed with the device.  It is the slickest smart phone I have ever owned, and I’ve had a few.  I’ve never owned an iPhone, so I’m not going to offer any comparison or enter the debate over which is better.  Besides, there has been more than enough written about how the Pre compares to the iPhone. Using my initial impressions of the Pre, I would like to focus on how advances in smart phone technology are enhancing converged communications applications.

The initial setup of the Pre was amazingly simple and easy.  I was particularly impressed with how easy it was to add email accounts.  For Yahoo, Live and Gmail, all that is required is your email address and password to add the account.  And clicking into the preferences page to adjust the settings for these email accounts was very intuitive.  Contacts associated with an email account are pulled into your Pre contact file, and the associated calendar will automatically appear in the calendar list.

I’ve also found that the Pre user interface is very intuitive and easy to use.  Launching and exiting applications is very straight forward.  And switching between applications can be done with a couple of finger flicks or clicks.  While using email and calendar applications, switching between accounts is also easy.  You can choose to view multiple accounts individually or merged into one unified view.

The ability to merge communications and information from multiple sources on a mobile device is one of the reasons smart phones are so popular.  Accessing both personal and business email, calendars and contact lists on a smart phone is one great example of how converged communications devices and applications make it easier to manage multiple channels of communication.  Add in the ability to access your music, videos, the web, and social media applications and you have a very powerful tool.  But providing very intuitive and extremely easy to use interfaces is where the Pre shines.

Many of the capabilities of the Pre and the iPhone have been around for a while.  But on earlier generations of smart phones, it was sometimes difficult to set up and use the advanced applications.   Much as been said about the how the vast number of iPhone applications increases the value of the device.  Most predict that there will also be a plethora of new Pre applications in the near future.  But the key value driver for any converged communication service, device or application is how much control and convenience it provides the user.

The increasing number of communication channels and converged applications that are available can overwhelm a person and make their life more complicated.  Providing the user with easy ways to control these applications and convenient access from a mobile device not only makes a good smart phone a valuable tool, it increases the value of the applications. The Palm Pre excels at providing this type of control and convenience.

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