Technology, Gadgets, IT, Games

Last week, Google unveiled its under-development Wave platform to an eager I/O audience. Google Wave is a Unified Communications Interface, designed to replace email as a collaborative tool. Think of combining google docs, email and instant messaging in one system, and you’re getting close.

Replacing email is a big claim. They point out that email was first used in 1965, predating the Internet itself, and has barely changed since the standards were codified around 1970. It is a one-to-many system that makes collaboration awkward, and branches of conversations can get lost and people can miss out parts. Some email applications (including gmail) artificially group emails into conversations, but this still relies on every individual messages being sent to everyone involved.

Wave changes that by focusing entirely on conversations, and working backwards from there. Through an email-style interface, you can view the conversations you are a part of, with each one showing as an single document, called a wave. Within a wave you can format text and embed images, videos and maps – much like the best online WYSIWYG editors.

Collaboration & bots

You can invite people to the wave, and they can reply to the entire conversation, or just a part of it – similar to adding your reply in a different colour, part-way through the email you are replying to. You can protect parts of the conversation. A cool feature is that if multiple people are editing the wave at the same time, individual keystrokes are (optionally) transmitted, so you can see in realtime what they are editing, so you can avoid overlapping. The inspiration for this is a flaw with IM, where you spend half the time waiting for someone to finish typing before you can start reading their reply.

One of the main ‘new’ ideas in wave is allowing bots to join in the conversations. You can invite a bot to your wave which will post it on your blog; and replies on the blog will show up as replies into the wave.You can have a conversation showing all your twitter feeds, and do any amount of funky stuff through APIs. This also means it will work with mobile applications and a wide range of web gadgets.

One cool feature is that you can interactively track back through the history of the conversation, like on a wiki, seeing how it developed. This leads to some nifty gadgets such as one for Chess, where you can play a game and track back through the history of it.

Wave also has decent language tools built into it. Firstly, an inline spellchecker based on the context of a word (correcting “been soup” and “I have bean out”). Secondly, a realtime translator, allowing instant multilingual conversations in a wave…

The cloud & open source

Wave is a hosted service, not unlike email. The conversation is hosted on one server, and everyone collaborates through a web interface (or through APIs). This means it is best suited to the cloud (big centralised distributed server setups), as gmail currently is.

Surprisingly, Google have opted for this project to be open-source. Pretty much all the code will be freely available for people to develop on, and this means they can even run and host the service themselves. Google are being strangely transparent here, so if you host your own Wave installation, and collaborate with people solely on there, the conversation will never leave your servers, and will never call home to Google.

The next big thing?

So will Wave replace email? No chance. Whilst this is a very interesting collaboration tool, it is ideally suited to collaborations within a small team. It is totally inappropriate for quick messages (like IM), mass-messaging (bulk email) or solo documents (Google Docs). It is too complex and intricate for most uses, compared to a basic email – bearing in mind many people have trouble understanding Twitter. People will have trouble understanding what it is for, and pitching it as a replacement for “email” will give people the completely wrong idea.

Email is successful not just because of its simplicity, but also its compatibility. It has survived thousands of email clients coming and going. From Lotus notes to Netscape to Hotmail to Outlook to Gmail – it doesn’t matter what you use, email is still there in its simplest form. Even with Wave being open source and able to communicate with other instances, and even though Google have invented a wave protocol and started a foundation to manage it – it seems far too much like a google-based invention. With that attatched to it, people won’t trust it, and it won’t be able to be at the centre of what we do.

Google Wave will be available later this year, and you can sign up to try the beta when it becomes public at wave.google.com

Google Wave – videos and beta signup
A Curmudgeonly Look at Google Wave – Daniweb article on the key drawbacks with Google Wave