Google's Next Big Thing
Google’s next big thing, called Google Wave, is like nothing you have ever seen before. Well, actually, it is like two things you have seen before but you have never seen them together quite like this. It is email. It is a chatroom. Yet, it is so much more. Google is referring to it as ‘equal parts conversation and document’. If you think about that sentence, it doesn’t really make any sense. But the only reason it doesn’t make sense is because no one has ever really seen anything that was both a document and a conversation. Until now…
The developers behind this product, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, were the same two brothers who worked on an early prototype of GoogleMaps (and no, they are not ready to pump you up). After watching Maps become a success they began looking around for another project to work on and decided communication was the next big frontier in technology development. “Email is based on snail mail, only faster,” says Lars. “Wave is a conversation that exists and people contribute to it.”
The most obvious improvement over regular email is that Wave gets away from relying on long chains of emails that keep all the replies from everyone involved in the conversation. Instead of having to keep a conversation going using ‘reply all’, users can be a part of a Wave that exists separately from any one person’s Inbox. If people join the conversation after the Wave has been up for a while, they can use a nifty playback feature to catch up on all that has happened.
The nice thing about this is its simplicity. It runs in a regular Internet browser so there is no need for any special downloads and it uses a friendly ‘drag and drop’ method for navigating around the screen. To get a pretty cool glimpse of what this actually looks like you can check out the talk they gave when that introduced the product to world here. It isn’t necessary to watch the whole hour video, but start at the five-minute mark and keep watching until about minute sixteen and that gives a pretty good idea of all the bells and whistles. You will see how innovative it is, and the fact businesses will be using this instead of regular email as soon as it becomes widely available.
They are rolling Wave out in a similar fashion to the original Gmail rollout, meaning you have to be invited to be able to use it. You can request an invitation from their website wave.google.com, but not everyone will get one. They freely admit that it is still in the early stages and there are a number of improvements that need to be made. Among them is the fact that someone can’t be uninvited from the Wave and specific permissions aren’t up and running yet. One feature that has all developers jumping for joy is that the code will be open source, so programmers can develop their own applications for Wave.
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