The Future of Documents

Every once in a while, a technology comes along, which really change the way we think about technology at large, and pushes the envelope. Google is often behind those disruptive technologies, and Google Wave is no exception.

Google Wave is merging many of the “boundaries” we’ve taken for granted so far. Frontiers between instant messaging and asynchronous messaging; frontiers between Web 2.0, email and traditional document; frontiers between traditional and collaborative realtime editing, even the time frontier…

Replay of “wave” or conversation thread, annotation and highlighting of changes, concurrent online editing, automatic update of blogs or orkut pages, narrow-down by user or paragraph, version control, intelligent spellchecking… There are too many cool features to even scratch the surface here.

Google Wave is as close to the vision of the Future of Documents as it gets – evergreen, social, intelligent. And all of that in any browser, or even on Android phones, using good (not so) old HTML 5.

Watch the video and find out for yourself. It’s long, but it’s well worth the time.

Somewhat similar to reframeit in the idea, but quitedifferent in the implementation, here comes WebNotes. Instead of  “scribbling in the margin”, this technology uses the (equally famous) Post’It metaphor.

You can write your notes in post-its which can be positioned anywhere on the page, or highlight specific highlight elements on the web page. A sidebar lets you organize and manage your annotations easily with a drag and drop interface.

This nice tool is probably better suited for workgroups or single users than broader social bookmarking applications. The annotations are only shared by email, when the user requests it, as opposed to “shared on the cloud” by default like reframeit.

Another very interesting technology from the Office 2.0 conference is reframeit. This browser extension adds a margin to any web page, allowing users to comment, leave a note, or discuss specific elements in its content. The web document becomes “social” and “collaborative” – the real Web 2.0 !

The comments can be added very simply and are kept in context - they are linked  with specific elements of the page, such as sentences or images. They are then shown across the highlighted elements – the reframeit bar provides an interesting way of power reading through document by clicking through comments, taking you to the noteworthy parts of a long document.

This cool Document 2.0 technology transposes good old paper affordances (writing in the margin of a book or document) into the digital web universe. You can keep annotations to yourself, share it with your team, or with the world – turning any web page into a real “social” medium.

Make sure to check out this funny video of how presidential candidates can also be reframed.