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.
[/caption]

I just got back from the recent Google I/O developer conference and was struck by it’s simplicity.  It was short, only two days. It provided great content.  It provided great food and snacks.  It even had the requisite Wii and Rockband pods and upped the ante with Pool, Foosball and chair massage. 

So enough with the format, what was the message?  The message was all about the importance of HTML5 and how it was supported by all “modern” browsers.  The browser made by the boys in Redmond was not on this “modern” list.  I haven’t followed the HTML 5 standard that closely but was surprised along with others with what could be done within the browser without a plugin.  Does this mean Adobe should worry about Flash marketshare dropping?  Not immediately, but in a couple of years, maybe so.  In a nutshell you have some new tags and features to consider:

<canvas>  This tag allows you to have pixel level control in the browser and do things such as draw a diagonal line.  They even created O3D which allows you to create compelling 3D graphics and use the graphics card, not the CPU.

<video>  Now you can embed a video as easy as an image without worrying about plugins or codecs.

Geolocation – Your PC or Laptop can now be as smart as your iPhone and you can choose to share your location with the browser to get location awareness in Maps or other apps.

App Cache and Database -  HTML 5 allows you to do some interesting caching and has it’s own SQL Lite DB (very similar to Adobe AIR).  This can allow you to cache portions of your app for faster access or to do interesting offline applications in the browser.  Google Mail already uses this approach on the iPhone and Android.

Web Workers – An API for running background Javascript so you can do things asynchronously and not slow down the user experience.

The big question of course is when is the HTML5 support going to be broad enough that developers can take advantage of all of this and really exploit it?  Google asked that we as developers push that curve and not allow these features to lie dormant for years as was the case with the foundations of AJAX.

My next post will talk more about Google Wave and some other announcements that came out of I/O 2009.