One of the trends to catch my eye this week is Google Wave; the personal communication and collaboration tool, was announced at the Google I/O conference, which ran from May 27 –28 this year.
Wave is an open source platform (built entirely using Google Web toolkit) and showcases what can be done in the browser. The entire platform is an HTML5 application, with the exception of adding attachments to a Wave, for this alone you need Google Gears. The platform has been under development for the last two year at Google and is brought to you by the same team that built Google Maps. Google Wave has an API, which will allow you to embed Wave in your own web pages (your blog for example) or create extensions to the platform. As I said, Wave is open source and there is a published protocol so that anyone can create their own Wave system.
So, how does it work? Well take email for example, which was invented 40 years ago and was modelled on a well understood messaging protocol; snail mail. Messages were sent to one or more people and each recipient would reply, or not, as need be. Now, imagine if we were to invent email today with all the experience we have with bulletin boards and wikis etc. there is no doubt that it would look quite different. Wave is Google’s idea of what email would look like if it were invented (by them) today. Instead of a number of reply –> response pairs, which is the current email model, Wave sees the entire conversation as a single conversation object (living on a server) that can be opened and edited by anyone added to the Wave. This metaphor allows a participant in the Wave to instruct the server to insert his reply inline, including his avatar, so that it is clear who is saying what. Once there has been any number of such edits, and if it is required, the “finished” document can be extracted from one Wave into a new Wave for wider circulation. But what happens if you are added to the Wave late and you want to see how the present state of the document was reached? Well for that there is the playback function which allows you to see how the document evolved, from it’s inception, to it’s present state – one edit at a time. Google are planning to add a set of power tools to this functionality that will allow you to only playback edits from a single participant etc. Of course, there is also an option to make your edits visible to only a subset of the participants.
Powerful though this undoubtedly is, the real collaborative power comes from Wave’s ability to be embedded in other web pages such as blogs; this opens the blog up to the full power of Wave. Now when your readers comment on a posting they get added as a participant of that Wave. You can reply to them from your web page, or from the Wave client (a browser application). From your client you can add others to the Wave, who can contribute without ever going to your web page, as any replies made by them are visible anywhere that Wave is visible, including your web page. As other readers comment on these replies, so they are added to the Wave as participants and join the conversation. After some time, it maybe be that no one is updating the Wave from your web site, but are instead using the Wave client to continue the conversation, but the beauty of Wave means that the full conversation is still visible on your page.
The API is not limited to embedding Wave in other web pages though, it also allows you to create extensions to Wave. The team realised how important developers were to the success of Wave so they wanted to make sure that the extension model was robust. To do this they wrote a lot of the functionality of Wave in that very extension model so that their (and your) extensions would live as first class citizens of the Wave platform. One such extension is the spell checker; the Wave spell checker not only checks the spelling of words (as you’d expect) but is context sensitive, being able to correctly detect not only misspellings but the incorrect use of a correctly spelt word that sounds the same; e.g. through and threw, been and bean, won and one, etc.
There is no doubt in my mind that Google Wave is going to be a great boon to those of us in the evangelism world who use collaborative tools day in, day out, and I can’t wait for it to ship later this year.