Too many times to count this year I’ve had students who e-mailed .docx files to themselves and couldn’t get them opened. Not every computer on campus had been updated with a .docx to .doc converter. (With Office 2007 for PC, Microsoft started zipping their files for compression purposes, added an ‘x’ to the file extension, and didn’t play well with anyone else.)
Check out the news from Google’s blog. One more reason why it would be great to see more people use Google Docs.
Also, if you haven’t seen Google Wave, you should check out the demo video at http://wave.google.com/. It follows the mindset from Gmail with e-mail as a conversation instead of a list of files.
But where it goes further is just how much it incorporates other things that you do on the Web. You can reply to sections of a wave/message and have your little dialogue bubble show up. You can drag photos straight from iPhoto into the wave and place them wherever – a much easier way of attaching pictures to a message. It fits into the conversation in much the same way that pictures in a blog do. It even gives a little thumbnail of the photo on the other person’s end while you are uploading.
What’s really crazy for me is how it handles your replies. Depending upon how you set up the wave (remember: message/conversation entity), if a person is looking at that same wave on their computer while you are replying, they can see you type, character for character. It’s like old school BBSes, where for chat you connected straight to someone’s computer and they saw what you were typing. (Now you only see that in action movies.) It makes the conversation more productive – if you are logged in, you don’t have to wait for the “they’re typing, they’re typing, boom! long message” thing that happens currently with online messaging.
The pro side is pretty cool. It opens up many doors, many conversations, that flow seamlessly. They demoed it this last week, before it was done, so that developers could get their hands on the API to start creating applications for Google Wave. This should result in some great stuff already available when it launches later this year.
The con, though, is that it’s very easy to take what someone wrote in a wave and put it in a blog/Facebook note. It’ll be interesting to see how they work in some of the privacy issues. People invited mid-wave can play back the conversation to be caught up-to-date on what has been previously discussed. Rasmussen demos a secret message part, but it will be interesting to see how many people forget who can read what they’ve written. It raises some great issues of student/staff errors in communication.
I’m excited. My gut reaction, to be honest, was to think it was like this Todd Strasser book.
