COMMENT: Are we ready for an email upgrade?

Sep 3 2009 by David Coxon, The Journal

IS email broken? It might strike you as an odd question to ask: after all, most of us regard email as the de facto standard in communication.

But maybe this very popularity is holding email back.

While other technologies are constantly evolving, email seems stuck in some sort of time warp. Its structure still resembles that of the bygone era of postal systems, with inboxes, folder structures, carbon copies and correspondence bouncing back and forth.

Even the underlying technologies have been reluctant to move on. Granted, email uses HTML formatting (the same technology as the internet), but it’s a dumbed-down version, incompatible with CSS (the code that gives websites much of their styling) or embedded Flash (the code used for interactive animation), for example.

I’m not saying email is broken, but maybe it is in need of an upgrade. And it’s not just me who thinks this.

A while ago now the guys at Google decided that the problem needed some of their special attention, and asked developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen to take a look at it. The Rasmussen brothers are the team that brought us Google Maps, so they’re used to delivering truly massive projects.

They decided to scrap the existing models and start by asking, “If you were designing a new communications system from scratch, what would it look like?” What they came up with was Google Wave – a richly formatted system capable to working in real time and including text, photos, videos, maps and other tools, all within a standard browser.

In May this year Google announced Wave to the world and opened it up as an open source project, meaning the code was freely available for developers to use and manipulate so they could build it into their own applications – hopefully making it even better and easier to use.

A few months of development later, and Google is preparing to send out 100,000 invites to users to start testing their new, improved way of communicating.

Wave has the potential to change the way we communicate, but are businesses really ready to make that change? Are bosses ready to accept that online collaboration and communication can save time and money? Are corporations ready to take the leaps of faith required to empower employees to express opinions freely in public?

Only time will tell whether we’ll say hello to an improved way of communicating – or ignore it without so much as a glance.

David Coxon is ICT manager at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.