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.

Interesting Wired Article on the Future of Reading book.

The author’s view of the future of reading books resonates strongly with my view of the Future of Documents: in order to move away from paper in many usages, the electronic document needs to provide affordances than the “legacy” format (paper here) does not provide. This includes annotation, but more importantly the capability of allowing these annotations to be shared with some of your colleagues through “Web 2.0″ channels, as is provided by technologies such as WebNotes or reframeit.

As the author concludes: “Taking them digital will unlock their real value: the readers.”

The document is evolving from a static, confidential container information to a social, shared and tagged device. Web 2.0 is paving the way to the “Future of Documents”.

I am currently following a great training by Sharon Crost on how to cross-fertilize the various media which constitute Web 2.0 and how to make your interactive marketing much more powerful through Web 2.0. Definitely worth it, if you get a chance.

In doing that, I am trying to see beyond the obvious ways to improve my blog audience and content, and to draw parallels with the “document” as we know it – how do you cross-fertilize documents and sources of information to make your customer documents more focused and more impactful? How do you differentiate your documents from others, so that customers drowning in Information Overload pick your documents over others? How do you make your documents “viral”?

These are a few things I’ll try to reflect upon over the next few weeks – although my blogging might be a bit disrupted by my XPLOR participation.

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.