| The new 'wave' of online communication |
Google Wave, brainchild of Lars and Jens Rasmussen, brings promise of a product which shows email as it would look like if invented today.So what does the future of online communication look like? Lars and Jens saw email and instant messaging as mimicking traditional forms of communication - snail mail and telephone conversations. They saw an opportunity to create a new platform which would combine email, instant messaging, social networking and online collaboration into a simple interface, with real-time (simultaneous) interaction. A full demo of the product can be seen below:
The Moxy team saw a live demo of Google Wave by Lars at the 2009 Warren Centre Innovation Lecture. Lars promised developer accounts for those that attended the lecture and Moxy looks forward to exploring the API. In particular the thought of extending a wave to create a collaborative model (as opposed to a collaborative document) looks appealing and worthy of some exploration. Conventionally in business at least, models are typically built by analysts in isolation using proprietary tools to produce findings that are then presented back to decision makers. Because conventional models are created in a closed environment, often underlying assumptions are not made explicit and data sources are not referenced because such knowledge is held tacitly within the team. A closed approach to modelling leads to difficulty when sharing the analysis with decision makers who cannot assess the quality of the model and therefore do not know if they can trust it. It also makes the model difficult for others to pickup and build upon. An open approach to modelling, one in which anyone associated with the endeavor can view, critique and improve a central version of the model could generate a higher quality model in less time than the traditional closed approach. |
