Its a bit hard to describe what Google Wave is because it has so many features and it dabbles in so many areas. Let me address some of the key features that I think really make Google Wave a serious game changer on the web today.
1) Robot, meet human.
For those who haven’t watched the video – Wave allows you to build robots that can parse what you type and basically write text back (its a bit more complex than that – you’ll have to look at how they structure messaging).
With Wave robots, you have a framework for the real semantic web – humans communicating to robots (and vice versa). The goal of the semantic web was for each element of the web to contain some metadata on it for software to parse and make additional meaning out of. The real problem is with the current web structure – how does the robot receive the information? (you can’t just scrape every website). Because of this, robots are currently hard to build, hard to communicate to and from, and not part of everyday life. Google wave will change that.
2) Human, meet human.
Real time, instant keystroke by keystroke updates.
Google Wave takes away the lag time between conversations, resulting in something that feels like you’re talking. Etherpad did this, but not in such a large scale and without the multimedia element. This restores some more of the human element of socializing that has been lost through text – very important. It makes Google Wave almost compete in the social sphere. Almost. We’ll see what Robots and Gadgets come out.
3) Work Collaboration and Group Productivity.
Wave implements version control on all documents – called playback.
Collaboration is one area that Google Wave dominates almost instantly. Seeing and making changes real time in a versioned environment cuts out the collection process and speeds up group workflow tremendously. Expand version control from coding to everything other document that you make, and you’ve just hit the Wave.
4) Embedding Wave will take over comment systems.
You can embed Wave elements on any external site, and it will include all the wave user functionality (like instant keystroke transmission).
No matter where you are on the web, you can socialize with others using Wave in a way that can provide instant feedback and real time discussions (which is much better than comment systems of today). Or, just use wave like one of the existing comment systems of today.
5) Robots. Oh so many robots.
There are so many custom robots that you can think of to make your personal data accessible to you from the web. Create a robot sitting on your machine that acts like an SSH command line (pm that robot script/generate model and have it reply to you the output). Create a robot can give you every document you have on your computer in Gadget-formatted text. Create a robot to message you whenever something happens to your webservers. It reminds me of the old IRC bots, only much better. So many possibilities that make Google Wave a great protocol for Web based browser applications.
6) Extensability and Openness.
What more do I say? Open source, and specifically open sourcing Wave rocks.
7) Messaging.
Ok, so sure, it does messaging differently too. It merges threads, version control, and instant messaging together in a way that is interesting, to say the least. Its more convenient than email, but nothing I couldn’t live without (We’ll see once I try it). I doubt its an email killer – unless you count the human to human interaction part.
In short, Google Wave is much more than just email – its fundamentally changing the way we interact – with people, software, data, and more.
I’m excited to try it out and to build something with it, and I think that every developer needs to consider a Wave world and what that means.
- 2009
- 05/29
- CATEGORY
- Uncategorized