The ultimate task optimization is to eliminate the need to perform the task in the first place.  It’s difficult to do better than a 100% reduction in effort.

It’s been almost a decade since Bill French and I, working together on a project code named “Elmer” first discussed the idea of “information finding you” rather than “you finding information”. It’s the ultimate optimization of search.  Imagine, exactly at the moment you realize you need to find something, that very something, somehow, finds you and arrives in just the right format, and in just the right context for the task at hand.

Around that same time, Microsoft introduced a new technology known as “smart tags” that was a step in this direction.  Smart tags are words or phrases that appear in office documents—e-mail, Word, Excel, Visio, etc.—that are automatically hyperlinked in real-time to relevant actions based on current context.  For example, a phone number may be linked to Skype (if you have Skype) to make a call and to your address book, allowing you to lookup contact details.  A customer name might connect to your CRM or support systems so you can quickly access order status, contact details, open support issues, and so on.

At the time (and to this day), I found the smart tag framework to be a brilliant idea which, while not without some warts, was reasonably well implemented.  We leveraged the smart tag framework in Elmer and later in the MyST platform and that feature rarely failed to wow folks in demonstrations.

But for reasons of both ignorance and paranoia, the techno pundits—quite notably, Walter S. Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal—lambasted smart tags as an evil conspiracy of the evil Microsoft empire. (No matter that smart tags are opt-in, subscription based, user-controlled, just like RSS—as a pundit it’s more important to move units than to make sense.) As a result, there was such a public relations poo-storm that Microsoft pushed smart tags (way) off the radar.  They didn’t actually kill the technology, but they buried it so deep that most people have never even heard of smart tags, let alone realize that they’ve been part of every version of Microsoft Office since Office XP.

But good ideas are hard to keep down.  When something is true, it just keeps being rediscovered and eventually, in most cases, old prejudices give way to reason.  So, today, I had to smile as I was reading The Future of Search: What to Expect in 2010 and Beyond when I got to the part about “ambient streams”:

“These are the major buzz words being whispered around the internet these days. Ambient streams are streams of information available in realtime, which, as Edo Segal explains in this TechCrunch article, “seek us out, surround us, and inform us”. What he means is that information from the web will not be attained by typing keywords into a search box in the future – rather, it will appear to us in an ambient way, on a range of devices.”

Information finding you.  Brilliant.  What will they think of next?

Today, CNN Tech released it’s list of top 10 tech ‘fails’ for 2009.  Last on the list: Google Wave.  Meanwhile, over at NowPublic, they released a list of Top Tech Breakthroughs of the Decade.  Guess who made the list.  (Hint: it’s Google Wave).

All of this proves nothing, of course, other than Google Wave has, at the very least, gotten people’s attention.

What’s your take on Google Wave?

The Shiny Wave blog recently published a summary of the Rules for Effective Waves (which were culled from a public wave of the same title).  As I read through the list of rules, I found myself generally agreeing with all of them.  But I was also thinking, this is way too complicated.

Google Wave offers the beginnings of a new communications paradigm.  But as I have said before, GW is not quite ready for mainstream adoption.

Today, GW is a great place for forward-looking techno- and social-media-geeks to experiment and ponder.  In that context, GW can already be very effective.  But try bringing in an entire organization—the executive team, the sales team, the marketing folks, engineering, support, and so on—and asking them to learn 16 rules (along with a dozen or so others that are not in this list) for using the platform effectively.  It ain’t gonna fly.

I remain a GW fan and believe it is an important new technology.  It’s just not ready for prime time.

One feature that Google wave is lacking is the ability to create read-only blips.  Well, a new Google wave robot, cleverly (confusingly?) named “Read Onlie” offers a creative solution.  As the project documentation puts it:

[The readonliebot@appspot.com robot] records the original wave content. Whenever it's edited, the content is replaced with the original. Simple as that.

After adding the robot to a wave, you can protect a blip by adding one of three keywords (case sensitive) to the any blip:

• OWNERONLY – nobody can edit except the owner of the blip
• READONLY – nobody can edit the blip including the owner
• RESTORE – restores the parent blip data (still needs work)

Perhaps a little clunky, but until the platform supports blip-level access controls, it’s better than nothing.

ZD Net Asia offers an interesting look at the idea of integrated inboxes.  In her article, Integrated inboxes wave of the future?, Victoria Ho looks at how companies like, Google, Mozilla, and others are recognizing that users are facing a new type of inbox overload.

For a long time, people have struggled with inbox overload in the sense that it is difficult keeping up with the volume of messages arriving in one’s email inbox.  But in recent years, the problem has multiplied to include keeping up with the volume of message traffic—not just email messages—in multiple different “inboxes”.  Many users have multiple email accounts plus accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Wave, blog commenting systems, news groups, etc.

Several fundamental problems—time to awareness, finding stuff, and responding efficiently—are not only growing in size, but are also growing in scope.  On top of growing traffic volume, add the need to monitor multiple distinct traffic sources and to manage workflows in multiple disparate environments and the situation quickly becomes untenable.

Forward looking companies are recognizing the need for an entirely new class of communication platform—the integrated inbox.  An integrated inbox is a centralized inbox that aggregates and unifies multiple disparate message sources such as email, Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave, instant messaging, etc.  The goal of an integrated inbox is to provide a single touch point for staying on top of one’s daily message tsunami.

While the idea of integrated inboxes makes tremendous sense for enterprise knowledge workers, look for early incarnations to surface in consumer offerings.  Quoting from the ZD Net Asia article, David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging, observes:

"I think the consumer market is leading the charge here, because people are communicating in a huge variety of new ways, and enterprises tend to be slower to adopt new technologies," he said, noting that worker demand will help move the way enterprises choose their IT products, "even if [these] were not on the CIO's plan" initially.

Think about your own daily activities.  How many “inboxes” to you monitor?  How much easier would it be if you had a single, integrated inbox?

In his recent post, James Pyles ponders, Why Hasn't Google Wave Gone Viral?  Of course, there are probably many reasons, not the least of which is that almost nothing—in the grand scheme of things—actually “goes viral”.  But even if Google wave is, potentially, one of those things that could go viral, it simply is not ready.

It's very, very early in the life of Google wave—one can't even sign up yet without an invitation, which adds some serious friction to the viral-going process.  But beyond that, GW is still so new that even the forward-looking techno-geeks are still just getting their minds around GW-enabled usage paradigms.

GW is still too confusing and too unpolished to replace established solutions, let alone to go viral.  But the new wave-paradigm genie is out of the bottle and it’s not likely going back in. GW will continue to evolve based on the feedback of hundreds of thousands of early users.

My hunch is that Google wave will never “go viral” in the sense that it explodes into the mainstream (and perhaps later, just as quickly, fades from grace).  Rather, it will slowly and steadily become more and more useful, more and more widely used, and more and more indispensable as both an application and a platform.

I recently blogged about version 1.0 of a great little Google Wave notifier application for Windows users.  Well, a new version 1.1 is now available that adds a little more polish:

• Now has a real installer (.msi).
• Option to automatically start with Windows.
• Option to choose which browser to use for Google Wave
• Option to launch Chrome in “Application Mode” (i.e., no address bar, etc.)
• Option to control notification balloon timeouts.
• Improved proxy server support.
• Improved error handling.
• Additional language translations (French, Romanian, and German)

If you use Google Wave and Windows, I suspect you’ll find this free notification utility a worthy addition to your desktop.

Having used Google Wave now for several months, my overall impression is that Google Wave is an important new technology.  It’s not an “email killer”, but there are many cases where using wave makes much more sense than using email.  It’s not a “IM killer”, but there are many cases where using wave makes much more sense than using instant messaging.

Opinions about wave differ greatly, but there is one area that everyone (that I know) using wave agrees on:

Nobody needs or want another inbox to have to check!

That’s exactly why Danny Tuppeny’s freeware Google Wave Notifier is a “should have” for any Google Wave user.  (Well, those running Windows, anyway.)  Google Wave Notifier sits in the notification area of your PC and notifies you of unread messages in your Google Wave account.  The notification includes a summary of what is new and lets you easily navigate to Google Wave to read your new messages.

I’ve used browser plug-ins that perform similar functionality, but a browser plug-in is the wrong place for this type of feature for a few reasons: 1) it’s only available when your browser is running; 2) if you have multiple browser instances running, you’ll have redundant notifications; and 3) you’d need a similar plug-in for each type of browser you use (e.g., Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome, etc.)

The Google Wave Notifier does not include an installer, but installation is simple—unzip the program files into a directory and run the executable.  If you want it to start automatically whenever you start Windows, just add a shortcut to the executable to your Windows Start Up menu.

If you’re a wave user, take 3 minutes and install the notifier.  I think you’ll be glad you did.

Simply add this participant to any wave for which you want email change notices:

wave-email-notifications@appspot.com

After you add this the first time, you'll find a new wave in your inbox entitled "Notify global preferences". Visit that wave to set your notification preferences.

The notification messages are timely but contain few details—just an indication of who modified the wave and a link to the wave, so you’ll still need to visit the wave to see what has changed.

Within each wave, the robot provides three notification options:

• Email me just once (until I visit this wave)
• Email me on every update
• Emails disabled

Overall the robot works reasonably well, but I’d still like to see an email notification for new waves, not just changes to existing waves—at least until Google Wave becomes so ubiquitous that we need wave notifications for new emails. ;-)

Updates - 05 Jan 2010:

To clarify: Once the robot has been added, notifications are sent to all wave participants who have configured their "Notify global preferences" wave (not only to the participant who added the robot).

More importantly, there is now an even better solution that provides e-mail notification for all waves, including new waves, without requiring the use of a robot.