Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today

Re:Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invent... by DLWormwood on Thursday May 28, 2009 @01:03PM (#630571)

No kidding, this is just the traditional Usenet version of threading being made part of the protocol. (Modern web and e-mail threading custom all suck compared to what is the norm now.) While I can see the reasoning for making the system aware of threading from the start, it doesn't seem to solve any of the real problems e-mail and IM suffer from. (All related to signal-to-noise...)

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Re:Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invent... by abossy on Thursday May 28, 2009 @01:45PM (#630671)

Agreed -- it looks like Wave will dump MORE information overload upon me. I want less, dammit! Less e-mail, less IM, less pictures. Give me only what I will find of utmost value.

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Re:Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invent... by dgallagher on Thursday May 28, 2009 @03:35PM (#630892)

I totally agree with you abossy. I just wanted to mention that some people might actually "like" having information overload. People who are information addicts/junkies, or people who have attention deficit disorder, or people who are unskilled when it comes to "focusing" on a single task. There might be two sides to this...

I'm also curious if there's a pattern between introverts and extroverts when it comes to info-overload like this. Assuming spam isn't a problem, an extrovert may enjoy interacting constantly online, with many many different people, over the course of a day. An introvert may be the exact opposite. This would correlate well with "offline" introvert/extrovert behavior.

So the term "information overload" would have a different meaning for an extrovert and an introvert. For the former, it would be spam, or unwanted conversations. For the latter, just too many conversations which have little obvious value (small talk, etc...).

I've not seen any studies comparing introverts-to-extroverts when it comes to online information usage patterns (if anyone knows of one, please post it! :) ). So I'm totally theorizing here without any data.

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Re:Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invent... by pgebhard on Thursday May 28, 2009 @03:23PM (#630872)

I totally agree. I really love imagining a filtering/triaging feature being a part of Wave. If incoming messages were automatically (or with just some amount of learning) given an importance rating, that would make my mind much clearer.

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Re:Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invent... by whatusername on Thursday May 28, 2009 @07:25PM (#631202)

Have you heard David Allen (GTD) talk - he makes a good point that it's not "information" overload that the problem (otherwise your head would explode the first you walked into a library or logged into the Net) - instead it's the "potential meaning overload" - each little email may be very important and so pulls our attention.

I've always found it a good distinction

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Re:Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invent... by joeyo on Thursday May 28, 2009 @08:30PM (#631285)

Great, now we will have spam that tries to game the system to be flagged more important.

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