Google recently announced Google Wave – “a personal communication and collaboration tool”. It’s quite hard to describe but is, in a way, a combination between e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.
A ‘wave’ is a real-time collaborative conversation – it looks a bit like an e-mail, with participants (instead of recipients), and threaded conversations. However, anything can be edited at any time – you can re-write things you’ve already posted, and you can also reply to other people’s comments in-line (i.e. you can write a comment in the middle of someone else’s message). And because it’s all real-time, if multiple people are looking at the wave at once, they’ll see your changes as you type. Waves can also display images, maps, and much more. And did I mention that you can rewind and re-play conversations so you can see what changes happened when?
As I said, it’s rather difficult to explain. Andy Ihnatko of the Chigaco Sun-Times summarizes this fact quite nicely:
I imagine that there are as many pitfalls to defining and explaining Wave as Westinghouse and Edison found when trying explaining the concept of the electrical grid to the masses. You plug a light bulb into the socket and the crowd oohs and aahs and assumes that Electricity is all about illumination; it’s a marvelous way of producing light without the open flames or soot of candles and oil lamps. Technically that’s true, but it misses the point.
Check out his article on Google Wave for a great description of how Wave could be used in the Real World (Ihnatko describes a situation involving him submitting his column to his editor, and they both work on it and view the changes in real-time).
Wave has the potential to take off big-time. Google are hoping it becomes the ‘next generation of e-mail’. As such, they’re open-sourcing the whole thing, so that anybody can develop for Wave, and anybody can run their own Wave server (and any Wave server can interoperate with any other Wave server) – just like e-mail. We’ll be able to see whether Wave matches the hype when it launches to the public at the end of this year.
For another overview of Wave, take a look at Google’s introductory blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html. You can also see Wave in action, in this video of Google’s Wave Developer Preview event, where it was unveiled:
Interesting times ahead!
