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On the second day keynote at Google I/O they unveiled something big. This is new product is built by the guys who brought us Google Maps. Remember how surprised you were the first time you saw interactive maps IN THE BROWSER and could zoom down and see your own house? Well these guys asked themselves an interesting question: “What would email look like if it was invented today rather than 40 years ago before there was even an internet? “ The answer to that question is Google Wave.
Google Wave is a paradigm shift to be sure. It takes email and turns it on it’s head. It tries to remove the pain points of email and combine it with tools that didn’t exist 40 years ago such as instant messaging, blogs, wikis, etc… At first blush it isn’t evident how different this can be, but as they showed more of the feature set it became apparent that this has the potential to be something very special.
There is a concept of a “Wave”. A Wave is on the server and as with email you can send it (or more accurately share it) with others. However it is collaborative. Multiple people can update a wave simultaneously, and it has a very rich “track changes” type of feature built in. Those who have not yet read the Wave just see the final version, those who had read the original version see the changes highlighted, or with a strikethrough font as appropriate. Things get really interesting when you see the playback feature which has music like controls with a sliding timeline that allows you to “playback” the changes. You can do this with all changes, or just the changes made by a specific person.
Changes to a Wave are not merely seen upon save, but as each character is changed it is simultaneously changed on anyones screen who is viewing or editing it in real time which is pretty amazing to watch. It also incorporates the idea of chat within a Wave, and again you can see character-by-character typing. So there is no more waiting for 30 seconds for a friend to type a reply, you see it all real-time. These chats or comments can be placed in a Wave document around a specific section to have context.
There are other features such as drag-and-drop of pictures in a Wave from the desktop and again they appear immediately for others viewing that Wave. A Wave could be used as a quick way to share photos, multiple people can contribute their photos and you can view a combined slideshow of all photos, etc… There is even a great feature with one click of a button to share your wave on a blog. Since a Wave is live on the server all changes made to the Wave are immediately reflected on the blog, just like if someone else was viewing the Wave from the Wave client.
Waves are not just to replace email, but also documents. The development team showed how they use it to take notes in meetings, build specs and even build a “wiki” like repository of a Wave that combines links to other Waves. Initially this is only for rich text (think documents or email) but they plan to extend this concept to spreadsheets and presentations.
I was especially struck how the developers who know this product, designed it and built it are still learning how to use it. To illustrate this they showed a real example. They sent out a Wave to the team asking about going to a movie. Pretty soon people started replying to all (treating it like normal email) and soon the chain was cluttered. Then someone decided to update the original Wave and add three sections for people to add their names to: (Yes, No and Maybe). Then people just added their names under the appropriate section and it was easy to see who was coming and who wasn’t without having to cull through a bunch of replies. Suddenly the wave was an intelligent form instead of just an email. New technology is great, but if you don’t use the new paradigm it will not bring much benefit.
Now this is all well and good, but are enterprises really going to embrace this? I think Google was very smart in the fact that they designed this in such a way that most of it is open sourced and you can take this technology and build your own Wave server if you don’t/won’t trust Google with your Waves. They also opened up rich API’s so a Wave can be extended to do things like update a Twitter feed. I truly think that IF this ends up giving Enterprises the level of control and security they desire that this could truly be an email killer and bring radical productivity and collaboration gains to all of us at home and at work.
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Tags: Collaboration, Email, google, Google I/0 2009, Google Wave, Sharepoint
