How Google Wave will bring together all your social apps
Wave is designed to be a ground-up reinvention of the way we communicate and collaborate.
Google has given a sneak peek of its latest project – Google Wave. Wave is designed to be a ground-up reinvention of the way we communicate and collaborate. Think instant messaging, but with the open platform potential for plugging in Twitter and other methods of communication, too.
For the moment, Google Wave isn’t a public launch – that’ll be later in the year – but it will be made available to a small number of developers at Google’s Google I/O conference in San Francisco, taking place today.
In a conference call with TechRadar, Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager, explained about Wave. “It’s a communication and collaboration tool we’ve been working on for a couple of years down in Sydney.
“A Wave is a single shared space where two or more users can exchange real time dialogue, photos, videos, maps and documents in what we call a Wave. Everyone can reply to a Wave, people can come and go and you can drag and drop information from all over the web.”
PLAY GAMES: You can drag in information from the web and comment as you go
As well as running in a web browser, waves can be embedded in sites, while open source code means that you could even run your own Wave server. “Everything you’re [can see in Wave] is an HTML 5 application built with the Google Web Toolkit.
“It does push the limits of the web and it does require a modern browser,” adds Lars. It won’t work in IE6, but it will work in later versions as well as Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
“Later when we show the demo one of the new things we’ll add is integration between Google Wave and Twitter which is an example application we hope will inspire developers to build things for real. You build an extension for Wave that users can install, similar to installing extensions for Firefox.”
ACCEPT OR DECLINE: Meeting request or BBQ invite – you can collaborate with your mates or colleagues on events and chat about them in your Wave
Rasmussen worked on Google Wave alongside his brother Jens. Both worked for the mapping startup, Where 2 Technologies, acquired by Google in October 2004 – subsequently the brothers developed Google Maps.
The aim with Wave is to allow people to communicate and work together in a richer, more instant and integrated way – it was originally codenamed Walkabout. “We were looking at all the advances in technology that have occurred since email was invented over 40 years ago. We looked at how computers have improved dramatically and the many types of communication [that has come about] since then,” explains Lars.
CHAT AND SHARE: Look at pictures, then talk about them – you can drop into the conversation at any point
“We tried to come up with a new form of communication, as simple as we could make it, which has functionality spanning as many of these existing tools as we could come up with. We’re aiming to rethink what communication might look like if we try and rethink everything from scratch.”
“After months holed up in a conference room in the Sydney office, our five-person “startup” team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we’re very eager (and a little nervous) to return and see what the world might think.”
EDIT CONCURRENTLY: You’ll see updates appear letter-by-letter, while you can see everything happen in realtime. In Google’s own words, Wave will “try out some new ideas” such as concurrent rich text editing – you’ll be able to see on your screen almost instantly, letter-by-letter, what your fellow collaborators are typing into a message or document in a wave, unlike in instant messaging where you need to wait to see what someone is typing. (If you don’t like this, there is a draft mode.)
You’ll also be able to ‘playback’ waves so you can see how conversations have evolved.
INVITE: You can add participants to a Wave at any time.
Google is planning to open source Google Wave in the coming months while any developer can build extensions to Google Wave using our open APIs.
“The way we think about Wave is that it’s a communication system, a productivity tool as well where you can produce content but there’s a very rich set of APIs that come with the tool and that of course is why we’re releasing it to developers first,” explains Lars.
“We intend for Wave to be an open system much like email where you can have an account with any provider. We would love to see a future where different organisations build their own Wave services. We want to make sure users can interoperate with each other.
“All of the underlying protocols and algorithims have been designed with this in mind. We are going to make the protocol openly available and we intend to…open source the lion’s share of our code.
“We have built in some very important features, in particular anyone can run their own Wave server. This is particularly important for enterprises that would prefer to run their own Wave servers.”
SET TO DRAFT: If you don’t want people to see as you type, you can set to draft
Waves will also be searchable “When a web crawler comes by a site with a Wave on it, our servers will serve up that Wave in static HTML so they can be easily indexed,” explains Lars.
We asked him whether Google had any current plans to introduce advertising into Wave. “We have no such plans, this again is a very early release and at Google we have quite a luxury that in the beginning of the life of a product we focus exclusively on technology and making a product successful.
“The question of monetising we deal with later, this was also true of our last product Google Maps – it was a year and a half in before we even started to discussing [monetising it].
“By then it was even easier to do it as our existing advertising customers had lined up around the block wanting to advertise on Maps. We’re hoping a similar scenario with unfold,” he explains.
If you’re interested, Google Wave information for developers is available while you can opt to be notified when Google Wave is launched as a public product.
ADD AND SHARE: Drop in Google Maps to events, for example.
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