The Next New Technology ‘Wave’

The big buzz in our office today is swirling around Google’s work with HTML 5 and a centerpiece application smartly named Google Wave. Announced at their I/O conference keynote, Google Wave is email with a monster social-media makeover. Think true real-time online conversations through a combination of email and instant messaging, but that doesn’t do it justice. Every day we see new technology ideas with varying levels of “wow factor,” but only occasionally do we get something that is revolutionary. The significance of Google Wave is up there with the shift from DOS to Windows.

HTML 5 continues to break technical barriers by bringing desktop/client-side-based power and functionality to the browser. To showcase HTML 5, Google went beyond the “Hello World” sample with what they consider a true platform.  In the simplest terms, Google Wave is a next-generation email application. It’s the traditional email client functionality with an insanely intuitive and collaborative social media twist, plus an extendable API, and a bunch more.

Google has a knack for identifying and supporting the people who are ahead of their time with a cool and strategic technology.  Two rock stars in the Google world are the Rasmussen brothers, Lars and Jens. You may remember them from such applications as Google Maps. The story goes that a couple years back they were brainstorming about the next big thing, and as Lars eloquently put it, “We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?”

For more than two years in a secret lab located in Sydney, Lars and Jens approached email behavior like an innocent child absorbing the outside world for the first time. With their imagination, curiosity, and a clean-slate perspective, they made incredible observations and conclusions, some of which embarrass you with their common sense. Ultimately, the Google Wave team reinvented email, messaging, and media in a collaborative message vehicle they call a “Wave.”

The Wave is a conversation that has attributes of messaging, social functionality, media, categorizing, interactivity, and sharing. So how does it work? First you create your own Wave (as in email or messaging) and send it to one or more of your contacts. That’s when the fun starts. The message becomes part wiki and part Facebook wall, where you can collaborate on all or part of the Wave. In a hypertext manner, the Wave departs from the traditional linear messaging thread to an evolving conversation element in a social cloud.

You have to play with it to really understand. Google Wave is one of those technologies that gives you an “ah ha” moment, when your current email experience becomes instantly and hopelessly obsolete. You’re going to want to jump on this ASAP and bring your world of contacts with you.

Google Wave Dashboard

As Tim O’Reilly states, “A key point here is that Google’s relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication.”

What is a Wave according to Google?:

• A Wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A Wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the Wave to see who said what and when.
• A Wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a Wave can have faster conversations, see edits, and interact with extensions in real time.  

Google Wave Sample

Technically Google Wave is more than an end product. As Lars states, “The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the Web application people will use to access and edit Waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich-text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a Wave).”

A Wave has very non-tradition ways to actually perform work and communicate. For instance, say recipients are now participating in the Wave. If people are active at the same time, a Wave behaves like an instant message, except that you see each character as it is typed. You have the ability to enter a Wave at any point in the document/conversation. There is even a playback feature that allows you to go back in time and see the Wave from any point in its history.

Google Wave is really a platform with the ability to extend functionality via a set of open APIs that enable developers to embed waves in other Web services and build extensions. Of course, true to Google’s philosophy, they intend to open-source the Google Wave code. This is always a win/win for Google and community of developers adopting their platforms.

Some API Extensions: 

• Polly: an embedded poll/survey. In the wave shown below, participants are asked whether they can make it to a party. Responses appear immediately in the wave.
• Bloggy: A blog client, lets you make a blog post as a Wave. When people comment, they join the conversation.
• Spelly: A spell-checker that uses the entire Web as its dictionary.
• Linky: A link-recognition engine that is clever enough to recognize the link you just entered (e.g. a YouTube video or a link to a photo) and give you the option to embed the target of the link into the Wave.
• Buggy: A bug-reporting tool that can also be a participant in a Wave.
• Interactive Games: Here’s a real-time interactive chess game in Google Wave:

Google Wave Extended API - Polly

Useful References:

• wave.google.com: Current home for Google Wave.
• code.google.com/apis/wave: API extensions, documentation and sample code.
• waveprotocol.org: home for the protocol specs (draft), whitepapers and a discussion forum about the open Google wave protocol
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5: HTML 5 wikipedia resource