The Wave is Upon Us Posted on 2 June 2009 | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

おさしぶりです！ It's been a long time since I've used this thing, and I figured it was about time to get the ol' blogging wheels a spinning. Heck, my traffic is actually increasing, due to some mystery of search engines and lucky posts. As I am at a loss as to what information I could possibly bequeath upon the blogosphere that isn't out there already, I've decided to make this much more of a personal outlet - who knows, surely someone out there will find this useful interesting entertaining.

Today, after hearing a bit of buzz about this "Google Wave" thing, but completely failing at finding any coherent information about what it actually is, I watched the hour and something talk on it. And gee, this thing might actually take off!

Before explaining what Google Wave is, let me first describe the problem (at least for me) that it solves. Right now, I have a multitude of options when it comes to communicating with friends, family, colleagues, clients and assorted others. Instant messaging being the first and most immediate option, it's normally a good first option. I check if the person I want to message is online on one of a multitude of different systems - right now I'm signed into ICQ, MSN, XMPP, Facebook chat, AIM, and during working hours I'm on Skype. If they're online - great, send them a message. If they're not, well I can leave them an offline message - maybe. That depends on the service I'm using. A lot of people don't sign in to IM very often, so perhaps it's best to send an email. So, load up my email client of choice (Evolution, if you're interested), write a message, and off it goes. Email gets confusing quickly though - it has no real support for threading, and as soon as you add multiple people into the conversation, all hell breaks lose. This happens surprisingly often, usually with large threads about what and who and where lunch is with a ragtag group of friends and friend's friends. Already you can see how the wide variety of options of online communication, each with it's own different restrictions and short comings, and I haven't even touched on my use of Facebook and Twitter.

Google Wave aims to consolidate all these different forms of communication into a single method - it calls these communications 'waves'. In it's simplest form, a wave is a real time forum thread. You type, and anyone who is part of the conversation can see you typing. You can reply to what other people have said, invite new people to the wave, insert images etc. Pretty much all standard stuff, albeit more real time and slick than what you're used to. It's what's layered on top of this that makes it interesting. Firstly, users can edit what other people have written - of course this is annotated with who edited it to prevent confusion. This allows a wave to act as a forum for collaborative editing, and comes complete with a timeline allowing you to see who edited what when. Then there's the extensible architecture, which allows you to embed a wave anywhere, and embed pretty much anything you want in a wave. Examples of extensions went from as simple as a spell checker (a very good one I might add), to an application for organising who is and isn't coming to an event (my lunch email issue is solved!), and a chess game (okay, not the most useful example, but fun!).

My explanation barely scrapes the surface of how cool Google Wave is due to my suckiness at explaining things, so if you have a spare hour or so, check out the video. An hour might sound like a long time, but there's just so many cool features to show.

Here's why I think Google Wave will succeed:

  • It solves a real problem. Google didn't just make this because they could, it solves a real pain point.
  • It has the backing of Google. There are very few companies who have the resources and influence to push something like this through, but Google is definitely one of them. It's exemplary public image will help here too.
  • It's an open standard and federated. Google were clever enough to see that if they wanted this to be a success, they couldn't run a dictatorship.
  • It's open source. You can set up a wave server using the same software Google runs. There's no point having an open standard if it's too hard to implement (see Office Open XML).
  • It's extensible. By allowing other developers to extend the protocol, it opens up a world of possibilities. See Facebook (I'm talking about the handful of useful apps here, not the hundreds of useless quizzes and werewolf wars.)

I, for one, welcome our new Wave overlords.