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Suddenly, communication habits of everyone changed. People started grouping their communication into topics and resurrecting old 'waves' when it was about the s

Suddenly, communication habits of everyone changed. People started grouping their communication into topics and resurrecting old 'waves' when it was about the same topic. For example, if we were talking about bonuses, and then spoke about something else for two weeks, then came back to bonuses, we would simply resurrect the old wave. I'm sorry but couldn't he have achieved the same with a threaded email client? It sounds like Wave just helped him smooth over a lot of poor email practices - perhaps on the other end of the conversation as well, but still.

maxklein 17y ago
It's easy to change your communication habits. But it's very difficult to change the communication habits of others - particularly people you only deal with for a single contract.
- brown9-2 17y ago
  So would you say the primary benefit of using Wave was it's effect on the people you communicate with? It was hard for me to get out of the article if the big benefit was on how you communicate, or if it was how they communicate with you.
  - maxklein 17y ago
    I would say both: I don't use a desktop client because I use multiple computers regularly and there are different OSes on the PCs. I don't like the context switches between desktop clients. So my email habits were bad, as where those of the others. Wave naturally guided us to a different way of communicating.
- jbellis 17y ago
  That makes sense, and yet, getting people to switch to Wave is a whole lot more of a change than changing email clients.
  - sjs 17y ago
    Changing existing methods is more jarring than adopting an additional method, imo. Others probably disagree.
forkandwait 17y ago
I'm sorry but couldn't he have achieved the same with a threaded email client? Wave allows you to rearrange and drop messages so that you can restructure a conversation to make it easier to follow, kind of like I think rebasing in git is supposed to work. If all the participants in an email conversation adhere to a strict bottom-quote and trim discipline, then you can keep everything organized in a threaded email reader. However, wave makes it easier to not include all the quoted cruft and keep replies in order for those people who haven't been initiated to "proper" email conversational etiquette (which is probably most of the internet). You also don't have to leave things in your inbox to keep them current, though that might be a bad email habit of mine. A wave is "heavier" than a conversation but "lighter" than a label/ folder.
Groxx 17y ago
"I'm sorry but couldn't he have achieved the same with a threaded email client?" I would agree... but I've yet to see an email client that never breaks threading when handling emails between X number of other email clients, some of which are not threaded, some of which strip attributes, and some of which rewrite attributes. Emails need a better, unified threading control, and clients need better, more powerful organization tools. Once that's done, sure, a proper email client would do the same thing, though with significantly increased duplication (5 replies == 5 emails to each person in the conversation, or a single highlighted thread in Wave(-like) apps).

maxklein 17y ago

It's easy to change your communication habits. But it's very difficult to change the communication habits of others - particularly people you only deal with for a single contract.

brown9-2 17y ago
So would you say the primary benefit of using Wave was it's effect on the people you communicate with? It was hard for me to get out of the article if the big benefit was on how you communicate, or if it was how they communicate with you.
- maxklein 17y ago
  I would say both: I don't use a desktop client because I use multiple computers regularly and there are different OSes on the PCs. I don't like the context switches between desktop clients. So my email habits were bad, as where those of the others. Wave naturally guided us to a different way of communicating.
jbellis 17y ago
That makes sense, and yet, getting people to switch to Wave is a whole lot more of a change than changing email clients.
- sjs 17y ago
  Changing existing methods is more jarring than adopting an additional method, imo. Others probably disagree.

forkandwait 17y ago

I'm sorry but couldn't he have achieved the same with a threaded email client? Wave allows you to rearrange and drop messages so that you can restructure a conversation to make it easier to follow, kind of like I think rebasing in git is supposed to work. If all the participants in an email conversation adhere to a strict bottom-quote and trim discipline, then you can keep everything organized in a threaded email reader. However, wave makes it easier to not include all the quoted cruft and keep replies in order for those people who haven't been initiated to "proper" email conversational etiquette (which is probably most of the internet). You also don't have to leave things in your inbox to keep them current, though that might be a bad email habit of mine. A wave is "heavier" than a conversation but "lighter" than a label/ folder.

Groxx 17y ago

"I'm sorry but couldn't he have achieved the same with a threaded email client?" I would agree... but I've yet to see an email client that never breaks threading when handling emails between X number of other email clients, some of which are not threaded, some of which strip attributes, and some of which rewrite attributes. Emails need a better, unified threading control, and clients need better, more powerful organization tools. Once that's done, sure, a proper email client would do the same thing, though with significantly increased duplication (5 replies == 5 emails to each person in the conversation, or a single highlighted thread in Wave(-like) apps).