Google’s WAVE Application

I just completed an Online Seminar (the better part of 2 hours) viewing of the about to be released (sometime this Summer?) Google Wave Application. This seminar was geared towards API (Application Programming Interface) developers. Google’s Wave is “Open Sourced for developers”. Which, loosely defined, means… “Ya’ll Come and help us develop this puppy”.

WHAT IS WAVE?

Google Wave is a new communication service previewed recently at an API Developer’s showing called “Google I/O”. “A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more”. The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games, chat (Twitter for example), or discuss recent news.

FIRST THOUGH, A LITTLE BIT OF “WEB HISTORY”

Two of the most influential successes in digital communications, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate some analog counterparts. Email mimicked “snail mail”, and IM (Instant Messaging) mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communications have also been invented; Websites, Blogs, WIKIs, collaborative documents, etc. Computers and networks also dramatically improved along the way.

THEN ALONG COMES A NEW IDEA!

An idea which quite possibly may be the birth of something HUGE, taking us rapidly from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, and completely reshaping the way that we view computer interaction, both in Business and/or Social Networking. Email is now 40 years old, yet still remains the most popular method to communicate. Email came before the internet… before the web. What would email look like IF it were to be invented today?

Email becomes REAL TIME. Instead of simple static documents that need to be created, SENT, distributed, and then REPLIED to, with the same ponderous and static distribution back to the originator. Imagine this whole process occurring in REAL TIME, with all participants of the WAVE making their individual contributions TO that Wave!

Spell Checking also occurs in Real Time as you type your contribution to the Wave. But it’s also so much more than just a “spell checker”. It’s also a “context checker”. Here’s a real example used in the seminar. A demonstrator typed “icland is an icland”. The “spell/context checker” converted this (INSTANTLY) to “Iceland is an island”. Thunderous applause resulted from the programmers in attendance!

WHOSE IDEA IS THIS?

Two engineering brothers (Jens and Lars Rasmussen) created a well known (and well used) application by the name of Google Maps. This also morphed into Google Earth and Google Sky! They then conceived of a new idea/project, which they codenamed “Walkabout”. This idea has morphed into Google Wave!

They started with a set of tough questions:

* Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?

* Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?

* What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

They then gave developers an early preview of “Google Wave”.

WHAT’S A WAVE COMPRISED OF ANYWAY?

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Think of a “wave” as something akin to a “thread”. The WAVE starts out simply, gathers participants, and the WAVE builds. It can gather documents, text, graphics,photos, videos, IM’s, WIKI’s, etc as it “builds”.

Wave is an HTML5 App that uses your browser as it’s engine. It’s quite easy for me to imagine the platform being a simple NetBook (or Smart Phone), with it’s internet connectivity, using it’s browser as your “Window” to ALL of your communication needs!

HOW IT ALL WORKS:

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a “wave” and add people to it. Everyone on your “wave” can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly (in REAL TIME I might add, NO waiting required!). It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages (IM’s) as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it (the thread) evolved. This “Playback” capability allows for Newly added participants to “catch up” with conversations, and other added content that occurred before they were added to “the group”. One mouse click on a button… boom! instant “catch up”. Very, very nice capability indeed!

Google says, “As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we’re inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch.” Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

* 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). This feature ALONE is incredibly powerful. Have you ever tried to create a photo album that ALL members of a group can add to? And merely by performing a drag and drop operation? ALL members of the Wave are upgraded simultaneously AND instantly! And, again, any added Wave participants can “catch up” by merely clicking the “playback” button! WOW!

* Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services (Twitter for example), and to build new extensions that work inside waves.

* The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can inter-operate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, they intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

In Wave, what you would think of as an email “REPLY” can be inserted into this “next generation email” scenario as an IM exchange. All of which occurs in REAL TIME. Current IM exchanges (let’s use Skype texting as an example) you spend most of your time watching a “pen scrawl”.. indicating that the other party is typing… typing…. typing…. when, in WAVE, you watch character by character as they are actually being typed. Imagine how much quicker IM’s transpire if you can be reading while they are typing…. and vice versa. This allows you to “formulate” YOUR OWN reply as you read. This can DRAMATICALLY speed up the conversation. BTW, there IS a check box that you can invoke so that others CANNOT see your typing (mistakes and all) until you hit “return”. Have it YOUR way!

This will allow email “type” communications to be combined with IM type communications, all to be combined into ONE TOOL! Once again, new participants can be added to the Wave with a simple mouse click, and a simple function called “playback” allows the new Wave participant to “catch up” to the Wave by adding in prior subject threads, that they, otherwise, would not be privy to.

Private replies (akin to DM’s) can be injected into the threads, and they remain PRIVATE. Pictures can be dragged (from a desktop looking Wave panel,) right into the content of the Wave. Thumbnails appear immediately (as the file transfers of the photos takes place behind the scenes). HTML5 can not support this drag and drop from the desktop quite yet. However it’s, as we speak, being implemented into the new spec. It’s the ONLY part of Wave that isn’t accommodated as yet! Group photo albums can be created quite simply with WAVE, something that remains complex to do with today’s current tools.

This technology is incredibly exciting. I can’t wait for the developers to get busy with API’s and turn Google Wave’s infrastructure into something incredibly flexible and useful. I believe WAVE will SURELY transform the way that we all interact on both Business AND/OR social levels.

Comment I found on the Google Wave forum, to me, pretty much encapsulates my feelings about where the development of this product is headed. I would give David’s full name (for credit to him) but it was not included in his post.

”

David said:

I just finished watching the video, and I was blown away. I was amazed at how content-centric this is. Any type of content can theoretically be added to a wave: chats, e-mail, documents, images, spreadsheets, code, video, twits, etc.–anything you wish. Even extensions are exposed as content within waves. This completely breaks down the barrier between different forms of content (and applications) and unifies it all as waves. This means that, theoretically, all of Google’s services can be unified within Google Wave. They wouldn’t necessary have to go away, but their interfaces would be used less, as all their content would be exposed through Google Wave’s interface. Not just that, but any service could be added and exposed as waves, from Google Reader and Gmail to competing services like Flickr and Facebook. Just like RSS feeds pull in the web to us, Wave could eventually pull in all our online activity into one organized place. And we’d rarely need to leave it!

The best part of all this is how open this is. Anyone can offer a competing services, and anyone can theoretically take all his waves with him to a competing service. One could even run a Wave server at home, solving the privacy issues of using a third-party service.

In short, this has the potential to change not just the web, but how we compute in general. I can’t wait to see where this goes.”

Many kudos to all at Google…… Dennis Dearborne The HiTech Trucker

Story by Dennis Dearborne