Yesterday I finally got some time to watch the 80 minute presentation on Google Wave, and I have to say that I wasn't disappointed. What I saw was something that I believe will be truly revolutionary, and has the potential to change how people work.
It is difficult to describe what Wave is in the written form, but I'll give it a go. Wave could be summarised as communication and collaboration mashup consisting of real-time email, with IM like features, the ability to collaboratively create documents/content, plus the utilisation of multiple extensions that give it that extra spice.
The demonstration showed how users can interact in real-time, collaboratively creating structured conversations that contain rich media, instant notifications, simultaneous user editing of the conversation, and live integration with resources such as spell-checking and language translation
My immediate thoughts are that this is so powerful that we will soon see the word 'Wave' develop into a verb alongside things like email, IM and blogs. So don't be surprised if you start to hear people saying things like "I've just created a new Wave, want to join it?", or "I'm going to update my Wave with this latest information".
In brief here are some of the key points that I put into my notes while watching the video:
- The thought behind Wave was to ask the question what would email look like if it was built today, given the advances on the Internet over the last few years.
- Email is like snail mail. Wave creates a shared object that users can access and modify in real time.
- Once a Wave is initiated, anyone can join at any point, and can get a review of how the Wave was formed, by using the 'Playback' function. You can therefore watch a sequence outlining all the changes that have taken place during the lifetime of the Wave.
- Updates in the Wave are live and concurrent. With two browsers open, we saw character for character updates taking place in each browser, as the other person was typing.
- You can plug the Wave into an external source e.g. a Blog, and updates made in the Wave appear in the Blog, and vice versa
- While creating content it is possible to open discussion points at any part of the content. When collaboration is completed, and you are ready to 'publish' the document, it is possible to collapse these discussion points, so that you retain only the finished document.
- You have access to a set of tools that allow you to organise the various Waves you participate in e.g. folders, searches, tags, and links. One nice feature demonstrated was the concept of a 'live search'. We were shown one browser doing a search of the 'Wave repository', and in the other browser a user was creating a new Wave. The 'live search' was able to immediately recognise the content included in the new Wave, and include this as part of the Search results.
- Google Wave will be an Open Protocol. The Federated model will allow any organsiation to build their own internal Wave environment, that will be completely independent, and accessible only be internal employees.
I thought I'd share with you an extract from this source about whether Wave will Revolutionise email:
The big question on everybody's mind, though, is if Google and the Wave team can hold true to their promise of 'reinventing email for the 21st century.' What we have seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg, but we can already envision how this could replace our internal chat room here, and how it could revolutionize the way employees in a company communicate. Wave definitely takes some getting used to, but once you get into the flow of things, regular email suddenly feels stale and slow.
Like any great tool, Wave gives its users a lot of flexibility and never gets in your way. If you want a Wave to look more like a document instead of a conversation, Wave will work just as well as when you just want to use it as a chat room.
It's still too early to argue about whether Wave can or will ever replace email (it's only a developer preview at this point after all). However, after using it for a while we were already wishing that we could add more of our contacts to our list so that it could become our default messaging system.
Wave isn't available in any practical sense to you and me right now, and much of the technology behind Wave requires features that we won't see completely implemented in most browsers for at least a little while, but you can sign up for Google Wave updates if you're eager to stay updated on any new developments. Expect to see it being widely available later this year.
If you have time I would highly recommend that you watch the full 80 minute video.
If you don't have time you can view a 10 minute abridged video. Also you can view some screenshots of Wave to get an idea of the functionality. I'd also recommend that you check out the thoughts about Wave from the team behind our internal Social Network tool, Oracle Connect.
Finally please feel free to leave some comments and let's get a conversation going about your thoughts on Wave.
