Google Wave: the next big wave

David M Williams
Tuesday, 02 June 2009 08:35

Your IT - Home IT

Betraying a sci-fi bent, the monicker “Google Wave” was inspired by Joss Whedon’s Firefly television series. In Firefly a “wave” was a video call.

Under the brave new world of Google Wave you don’t ponder whether to e-mail someone or chat with them but you simply and singularly send them a wave.

The “wave” is described by Google as “equal parts conversation and document.” Let’s try and make that more intelligible.

At the beginning, a wave is no different from any other form of contact; you type a message (maybe including multimedia content) and send it. The similarity ends here.

Consider a typical e-mail conversation. You send it, someone replies. They might delete your original message entirely. Or they may leave it, and respond above the text, or below the text. You write back. Someone else joins in. On and on it goes.

At some point, the e-mail message and its history of messages are all a mess. You will have many different views of the conversation at different points in time but with varying contexts, with horrendous formatting, and without clarity when trying to refer to it at a later point in time. You might add someone else to the To: or CC: lists and they must struggle to understand all that has gone on prior to their involvement.

A wave is different. It is a living, growing entity that consists of many, many individual multimedia messages – or “blips.”

Importantly, there is only one wave. It is a single message and is shared among all its participants within the cloud.

So, when the wave is sent what really happens is that a wave is created on a central server and the original message is the first blip.

When a recipient receives it they can respond. Two things are immediately different.

Firstly, the response is embedded within the message at the point they are replying to. They reply has context. There is no confusing top- or bottom-posting quandaries. There is no need to snip text. The reply is associated specifically with the part of the message it relates to.

Secondly, if the recipient is still online they can see the reply live – even as it is typed, if so desired (but this can be disabled via configuration options.) Any number of collaborators can be editing the same wave at the same time.

You may add additional participants at any time, and previous content may be changed. All recipients are notified of changes or replies and will see these live – if logged on, a la IM – or when they next log in – a la e-mail.

A “playback” facility will allow the history of the wave to be replayed from commencement to show the order in which it was edited, when blips were added, and who was responsible for each piece of content. This history may also be searched to view, and possibly modify, specific changes or messages.

The distinction blurs completely between not only e-mail and IM, but also wikis and documents. Without deliberately trying for buzzword bingo, I’d have to sum it by saying Google Wave is true multi-user distributed online version-controlled collaboration that seamlessly brings together many otherwise disparate forms of communication and connection!