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Riding the Google Wave

May 30th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> 4 Comments

google-wave-logoI gave Google Wave a brief mention on 30th May 2009 at (9h00 BST), but having now got to grips with it a little more I wanted to update my post. The take away message has to be: Google Wave changes everything.

The preview is here. It looks promising…

In fact, Google Wave looks far more than promising. In fact I had an epiphany after listening to Ray Kurzweil discussing the University of the Singularity, and you can read my thoughts on that here.

Having watched the promo videos from the developers and spent some time explaining what Google Waves are to a friend yesterday, I now realize just how powerful it will be. Google Wave is the way electronic communication should have been had email not been invented more than forty years ago before we knew now what we didn’t know then, as it were. Waves will be the communication tool of choice very soon.

The Google masterplan was becoming obvious once they released their OS, but there were hints with Google Mail and Google Docs and their other tools. They are essentially going to make the operating system invisible, you won’t worry about whether it’s Mac, Windows, or Linux, you will simply look for a net connection and you will be working within Google’s platform-independent meta-operating system.

According to Mashable: “Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.”

But, Mashable’s intro to Wave overlooks the key concept, Wave take everything into the cloud, that ephemeral offsite place where documents, data, images, sounds, everything, can be stored and manipulated by you and your contacts, collaborators and others from any browser on a laptop, mobile, desktop, whatever, without consideration for the operating system.

For example, email becomes not a packet of information sent from one computer to another, but a dynamic entity in the cloud that can be accessed, edited, added, by you and your collaborators (with controls). No longer will there be delayed deliveries, worms, attachment worries or whatever, the “message” will be on the system, you just access it when you need to.

But, it’s far more, all information can be pulled into this entity, shared and unshared, comments traced, annotations tracked. An “email” on Google Wave will be like a Google Doc, but an uber-doc, with bells and whistles, and brass knobs on!

For anyone thinking that Twitter and Facebook will change the world, just look at the numbers. Despite the hyperbole, Google dominates search and the vast majority of the connected population are simply NOT using social media. For most people, Google Wave will ultimately subsume social media or perhaps more gently make it all available transparently via their cloud.

There is literally no escaping the tsunami that is Google Wave. Seriously.

Oh, and did I mention…? It’s open source.

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4 responses so far ↓

  • Ralph Bassfeld // Jun 5, 2009 at 1:38 pm

    Andy Ihnatko agrees with you. Here is is article in the Chicago Sun Times http://www.suntimes.com/business/1606282,ihnatko-google-wave-060309.article

    I’d like to use Google wave for collaboration in our Church. Wonder if there will be a way to back-up the data offline and also to export it.

  • David Bradley // Jun 5, 2009 at 2:09 pm

    The idea of “backing” up occurred to me too. I wouldn’t want to be entirely dependent on the cloud for my work during those times when Google is offline or I cannot connect. I presume there will be something equivalent to IMAP synchronisation possible.

  • Johnny Optimist // Jun 5, 2009 at 4:15 pm

    This seems like it will be beneficial to most small businesses, or non-businesses.

    For the couple thousand large businesses, there are too many security holes such as record retention laws, group think inability, etc.

    Large businesses w/o a cohesive end goal would end up like the Million Penguin Project – a core of people trying to advance the project but another core equally dedicated to moving it in another direction and or sabotaging it. It will most likely lead to a lot of splintering as everyone would want to make their “own mark” when it comes presentation time.

  • David Bradley // Jun 5, 2009 at 4:42 pm

    I think there will be the option to run the underlying software totally behind a corporate firewall and with no connection to Google, so there won’t be the problem you suggest, at least that’s how I read it. This really is going to change comms.

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