Catching the Wave

by
Wave

Wave positions Google to smash and mash the worlds of social media and cloud computing, to drive a stake through the heart of traditional email, to sink Sharepoint and other proprietary collaboration tools. Wave is friendfeed on steroids and it is so much more.

“Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today,” according to Lars Rasmussen, co-inventor of the product. After watching the developer preview, I’ve gathered that Wave is:

  • “A personal communication and collaboration tool…”
  • “A simple communication object…”
  • “…an HTML5 app…”
  • Open source…
  • a shared object hosted on a server somewhere…
  • a return of the BBS bulletin board, but now with real time interaction…
  • a mash-up of email and IRC chat
  • shared screens with events registering real-time on all participants’ browsers, keystroke by keystroke
  • embeddable… you can embed a wave on any website
  • like a wiki only better — drag and drop file sharing!!

So, there’s a sophisticated threading that happens… you write, I watch what you write and I compose while you’re writing. Instead of the basic asynchronous nature of online chat or email, you doing a [write - wait - read] thing, while I do a [wait - read - write] thing, we become aware of each other in real time like in a real conversation and we compress those asynchronous [wait] intervals out of the interaction. Or, the conversation can, as in email, continue asynchronously if one of us is offline, away from the Wave.

Any time we want, we can pull in another participant, who can come up to speed by doing a “playback” of the entire interaction to that point: an instant replay of all the “he said/ she said/ he said/ he added/ she said…” stuff from the beginning of the conversation to the present. Any subset of participants can spawn their own “wavelet” within a wave to take a private conversation “offline,” hammer out an issue, and then rejoin the public conversation. The private interaction is available via playback to those who participated, but screened off from those who were not included. Playback allows us to track changes and to revert, making it chock full of wiki goodness.

Also wiki-like (but more powerful) is the drag and drop file sharing feature. I can drag a file from my desktop and drop it in the wave, essentially broadcasting it to everyone else who is on that wave. Sharing objects via drag and drop from the desktop to the browser isn’t yet supported by HTML5 so at this point it’s accomplished using Google Gears. The Wave team has put in a feature request to the HTML5 working group.

The Google Wave API supports extensions so applications can be built to interact with the Wave. The extensions are either “robots” or “gadgets” built to extend and enhance the Wave’s functions. A robot is an automated participant in a conversation buried deep under the covers. Robots interact with waves, talk with users and perform simple tasks like pulling up information such as stock quotes from outside sources. Gadgets? A gadget is a Google Wave extension that helps define the look and feel of the wave. A gadget can be the hub for an online game played by Wave participants. The Wave that contains the gadget is the gadget owner, not the user who added the gadget. Gadgets can be written with a text editor and hosted anywhere outside a firewall.

Mashable has a nice “Wave Guide” by Ben Parr that includes all the terminology you need to get comfortable with the Wave.

If you want to learn more Wave-ology, here is a list of links that can get you started:

2 thoughts on “Catching the Wave”

  1. Wave positions Google to smash and mash the worlds of social media and cloud computing, to drive a stake through the heart of traditional email, to sink Sharepoint and other proprietary collaboration tools.

    I remain dubious about that last point.

    Perhaps my experience in corporate America – does anyone else use Sharepoint – is atypical.

    Several workgroups setup wikis. We heavily promoted ours to one and all, integrated it with Active Directory. We ourselves moved all of our internal documentation to wiki. And we use the snot out of it for documentation, project planning, notes …

    All of it ‘free’ to the company.

    The Powers That Be bought Sharepoint and fell in love with it. They’re upgrading it – the silly thing now lives on a cluster of windows hosts.

    You can’t compete with City Hall. Or in this case a senior manager who likes him some Sharepoint.

  2. Thank you, Frank, a well-written, nearly poetic description that gives one a grasp of what the Wave is, what the Wave can be.

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