This is pretty cool stuff.

But.

Only a handful of people that I know, know how to thread email.

You know the sort; you spend 15 minutes typing out a well considered email and then you get a single line reply, quoting the ENTIRE email you composed with only a one word reply at the top:

rubbish!

On 28 févr. 09, at 21:11, Irdial-Discs wrote:

> All,
>
> A major scientific report by leading Japanese academics concludes that
> global warming is not man-made and that the overall warming trend from
> the mid-part of the 20th Century onwards has now stopped.

[60 lines of email snipped]

> This serves the agenda to deliberately whip up mass hysteria on behalf
> of governments who are all too eager to introduce draconian taxation and
> control measures that won’t do anything to combat any form of warming,
> whether you believe it to be natural or man-made.

See what I mean?

Equally bad is when the person replying does not thread the email, but just adds his 2¢s to the top, ignoring everything you typed. Even worse, are the group emails where everyone just adds what they have to say to the top of every mail, without deleting the preceding text, so that you get monster long mails threaded across separate mails.

Yes, these people are INSANE.

If these insane people were exposed to Google Wave, now only would they would be unable to handle threaded waves, but they would also be overwhelmed by the multiple sources, the blurry distinction between public and private messages, its realtime-ness, dynamic nature and all the other things that make this tool so very cool.

I cant wait to try it!

Perhaps Google Wave will cause people to start to use threaded conversations properly. There will be, however, massive resistance to it. There is resistance to Gmail, as good as it is; I have heard people say that they do not like it, and that they prefer Hotmail and webmail inferior to Hotmail over Gmail.

Go figure.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Software.