A lot of our experience in modern day e-communications comes from email or real time messaging like Twitter or IM. Each of these vehicles follows a unidirectional timeline method for organization: Newer messages in a conversation appear at the top of the list, and your own replies are stacked at the very top. This is fine and good if you've been a participant in the conversation from the beginning, but if you’ve been CC’d on an email chain 20 messages into the event, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the quoted message to start at the start.

Forums are the exception. The first message is usually at the top of the thread, with replies or other comments being added to the bottom. In this case, you start from the origin of the thread, and continue forward towards the most recent comment. In some cases, however, the thread can span many, many pages. If you want to extract some recent information, you need to jump to the last page, and start reading backwards.

Waving

Google Wave combines the timeline method of forum posts with option to reply asynchronously to any previous comment, just like with email.

A typical wavelet is started as a Reply. Replies are handled just like a forum post; they’re appended to the end of the stack, at the bottom of the page. You can write a miniature novel, embed a gadget, or add a file or image. When you submit your reply, you’re replying to the Wave, or more specifically, the original topic.

In the traditional forum design, replying to a specific post is usually handed by a formatted quotation block. This serves to remind people of the post that you’re commenting on. With Wave, you comment directly to the comment. When you hover over the bottom border of a comment it changes into a highlighted row, or you can choose Reply to this message from the drop down box.  Either method will open up a threaded blip entry box. When you enter your text in this box, it is posted as indented to the message as a way of indicating who you’re replying to.

Using these direct reply methods, you can insert a comment anywhere in the Wave. If you get into the game late, you can still post a comment or reply where it’s relevant, not where people will have to scroll down and parse in order to understand what you’re talking about.

Navigating Replies and Comments

The problem with Wave is that when a conversation grows to several dozen – or even hundreds – of wavelets, finding recent updates can be daunting. Thankfully, new updates are highlighted by having a heavy, dark border around them in the Wave. You can also jump from new comment to new comment by using the Spacebar. Wave also allows you to search a wave for a particular word or phrase using the Search box at the top of the Inbox panel, although at this time, the search criteria doesn’t appear to be highlighted to let you know where in the Wave the criteria appears.

Sometimes a conversation will get way off track. In this case, rather then sacrifice the original conversation to derailment, you can opt to use an existing blip as the basis for a new conversation by selecting the Copy to New Wave from the blip’s drop down menu.

Wave! What is It Good For?

The real question is “what can Wave do for us that email and forums cannot?”

Technically, the answer is nothing. Wave isn’t all that revolutionary in concept. Threaded discussions are old-school Internet, and if you removed that feature of Wave, you’re left with a single-window forum browser.

What Wave does, however, is to offer another option to people who don’t want to clog their inbox, don’t want to set up or use a public forum, and who want to organize their conversations in a single location. Wave’s file embedding features are a big plus for collaboration on projects, and the real-time updating means you can have something very close to a real-time, keyboard based conversation with others.