Google Wave: the next big wave

David M Williams
Tuesday, 02 June 2009 07:35

Your IT - Home IT

Only rarely does a new technology emerge which is so sensible, so simple and so wonderful that you can't imagine how it never existed before. Google Wave is one such thing and it's the biggest thing to hit the Internet since the Web itself.

The Googleplex crew managed to keep Google Wave under their hat until they chose to announce at last week’s Google I/O Developer Conference.

In fact, this project has been under production for two years in Google’s Sydney office using the code name Walkabout.

This code name was deliberately chosen. The “walkabout” is an ancient Australian aboriginal rite of passage where young men would live in the wilderness and trace the paths their ancestors had taken, known as songlines.

So too the two visionaries behind Google Wave spent time considering the path that their Internet pioneering forebears had followed, asking themselves the fundamental question, “What would it look like if we did it all today?”

These two men are Jens and Lars Rasmussen. If you recognise the name it’s because they were also the creative force behind Google Maps.

At the time Google Maps was hailed for both its vast utility and also its technical design, delivering a slick user interface that barely resembled the display-submit-wait model the Web had been built on.

Even while bringing Google Maps to fruition their resourceful minds began ticking over to the next big challenge. It hit them that communication was the key.

Jens Rasmussen considered that e-mail and instant messaging were both developed in the ‘60s to imitate analogue forms of communication. E-mail mimics regular postal “snail” mail and instant messaging (IM) mimics phone calls.

Jens was spot on. In fact, the first popular UNIX tools for these very functions were called, simply enough, “mail” and “talk.”

Yet, times have changed. Digital technology is vastly different to the early semi-connected slow networks of the past, and communication models like blogs, wikis and collaborative documents have all come into being.

The brothers hammered further at this theme.

Why, they asked, do we have to live with divides between different types of communication? Why do you have to choose to use e-mail or chat, or choose to make a document or a conversation?

Could all the different systems in use today be swept up into one single communications model that encompassed them all? And if so, how dead simple could it become?

What if a communications system was built today that used today’s computing power and didn’t just try to imitate your regular paper office form?

In short, the boys posed the question – what would online communication look like if we invented it all again, today?

Thus began Google Wave.