Google Wave: the next big wave

David M Williams
Tuesday, 02 June 2009 08:35

Your IT - Home IT

Google Wave is not yet available for use. You can register at its eventual home, wave.google.com to be advised when it is ready as well as watch the 80 minute developer preview presentation delivered at Google I/O.

You don’t have to wait long to see it in action; a live demo begins about eight minutes in. At 9 minutes and 30 seconds you will see how replies can be embedded at any location. At 10 minutes 38 seconds you will see what happens when participants are online at the same time. 20 minutes in you’ll see how waves are also a blogging platform.

If you watch the demo you will be similarly persuaded that the future of online collaboration as imagined by Google is exceedingly bright.

Of course, you might be excused for expressing doubts. Do you really want to use an online vendor-specific messaging web site to talk to your friends – or, importantly for business, to host all your confidential corporate information?

Actually, Google isn’t seeking to implement lock-in. They’re seeking to make a technology that becomes as ubiquitous and interoperable as e-mail is presently.

At this time, it does not matter if you or your recipient use Hotmail, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, elm, pine, sendmail, Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise, Microsoft Exchange, Squirrel Mail or any of the legions of mail servers and mail clients that exist.

E-mail is a defined standard; you can be assured that an e-mail you send – regardless of the technology on your end – will be received correctly – regardless of the technology on the other end. People can store their e-mail locally or online; companies can keep e-mail on their servers.

That’s the endpoint Google is seeking for waves. To encourage adoption the underlying protocol – formally titled the Google Wave Federation Protocol – has been released as an open protocol.

This means its specifications are visible to everyone. You can have confidence and trust in waves not to secretly contain viruses or Trojans or to transmit passwords. This means third-party companies can build their own royalty-free wave services and tools. This means corporations can have their own secure and centrally-stored wave systems and suffer no loss or leakage of company information.

This is a big and exciting move. It’s one thing to say the most used application on the Internet – e-mail – can and should be modernised.

It’s something else entirely to actually have the moxy to stand up and say you have the big idea that can do it, and subject your vision to the world’s scrutiny.

Google, and the Rasmussen brothers, have had that very boldness and idea. They’ve pitched a protocol, a system and a toolkit. They’ve dreamt what the future of online messaging ought to be and what’s more, they’ve actually gone and brought it to life.

Stay tuned. I’m sure we’ll be hearing news in the near future about wave support in coming releases of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint, on the Apple iPhone, the BlackBerry and messaging clients near you.

What would messaging and collaboration look like if it were invented today? The answer is Google Wave.


Australian readers have the opportunity to hear Dr Lars Rasmussen speak about Google Wave in person during the Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering 2009 Innovation Lecture series. Sessions will be held between June 30 and July 9 in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.