Collaboration is not Communication
We interrupt the regular transmission of LOLCATs to bring you this discussion about collaborative text editing:
There’s an interesting (to me) discussion going on, about live typing in Google Wave. Jens Alfke (of ex-iChat fame) wrote an insightful article about its history in iChat to which John Gruber replied:
I never mind instant updating when I use SubEthaEdit to collaboratively edit a text file, but I can’t think of a good reason Google Wave uses it other than the demo factor.
I think there are two and a half reasons for this:
First, live typing in Wave “feels kinda bad” due to an implementation issue imo. The nature of the transformations involved, and the fact that they have to work on a XML based format that Wave uses to represent rich text, makes it “feel” kind of chunky. At least chunkier that it has to. Most people won’t notice this however, I guess.
The second and more important reason is psychological. Simply put it boils down to: “COLLABORATION IS NOT COMMUNICATION”.
If I’m writing someone with the intent to communicate an idea, it’s of little use to have him look at me constructing my message. It makes people self-conscious and leads to the textual equivalent of stuttering at worst. At best it amounts to other people cutting me off because they already know what I want, which is efficient but unpleasant.
Nobody wants to write a love-letter ex tempore while the recipient watches you making typos.
Collaboration on the other hand is a process of working on something together, so it’s actually useful to have people chime in, correcting typos, changing sentences or pointing out directions to go. In real-time.
You are chipping away on the same block of marble to make a statue.
Efficient collaboration however depends on a communication backchannel. (So you can yell: “NO! DON’T DO THAT. THAT’S WAY WORSE” e.g. ;) )
It is and was a very conscious decision to not integrate chat into SubEthaEdit to keep the backchannel as separate as possible, by delegating it to iChat, Skype or plain old shouting.
Google Wave is - in its current form - “next generation wiki”, not “next generation email”. That’s way unsexy as a marketing slogan, but would emphasize collaboration instead of communication.
There is a long-term future for Wave nobody (including Google) has yet grasped, but until then I’m worried that the whole thing might fail due to Google’s inability to communicate what’s cool about it.
In my experience, collaborative editing solves a problem you usually don’t know you are having. You need to see to understand. I of all people understand that this is a tough issue, but calling that thing “next generation email” actually makes that problem worse.
