Incredibly Exciting Developments Are Afoot

Remember when I said email was dead? Hehe, about that. The internet's heart skipped a beat recently with news of Mozilla's Raindrop and Google Wave. Raindrop is in the early stages of development and is designed to be the next generation in email. The Next Web's Martin Bryant said that, "Raindrop is based on the idea that email isn’t the only thing people need to check regularly. Many people now have multiple email addresses, Twitter accounts, a Facebook account, IM accounts and more all vying for their attention." Check out Mozilla's site to see news about Raindrop and a cool video about the service.


If you've been on Twitter recently you've probably noticed that Google Wave has been a popular trending topic over the last week. Google Wave is another in development service that is looking to drastically change email to better reflect how important multimedia has become in the way we communicate. To see Google Wave in action you must, must watch this:



Let's not even pretend Google Wave won't be awesome, cause it most definitely will (I requested an invite but haven't gotten one, anyone out there already doing the Wave?).

In a previous post about the death of email, I expressed my concerns about how the changes in the way we communicate are becoming less and less personal. But, as I follow the Google Wave and Raindrop developments closely and with more anticipation, I feel like these services will only benefit us and help us to better communicate with one another. As the internet and our interests become more fragmented, services like Raindrop and Google Wave will have a profound effect on our ability to bring all of the services we use together and enable us to communicate with our friends and contacts easier.

Enough speculation. It'll be months before any of us will be able to tell if Google wave and Raindrop are indeed the future of communication or just another giant, internet related time suck.