Thoughts on Google Wave
Google announced a new collaboration/communication product/platform/protocol called Google Wave on Tuesday. It’s only available to developers as a preview right now, but some more information, place to sign up for beta-testing when it becomes available, and a video from the conference session are available here.
Reactions have ranged from great excitement, to some level of skepticism to some level of confusion.
From what I can tell, the big value-added is not so much in the realm of communication but in collaboration. When I first got a glimpse of how Wave works, what it reminded me was the publish-subscribe model that Mac OS 9 incorporated for a while. The idea was that a document would eventually be simply a blank canvas and different specialized apps would provide whatever necessary components—writing, diagrams, photos, etc.—on to the blank canvas. This model never took off, and publish-subscribe is not part of OS X.
Google Wave seems to bring this back as a web app. A “document” consists of a blank canvas, to which a group of people can bring whatever they would like, including records of their communication. A key innovation in the age of internet is that a document is no longer a static snapshot consisting of only the latest revisions—it is a stream that captures the entire process through which it evolved from the beginning.
I have requested to participate in the beta-testing (but then aren’t we all still beta-testing Gmail?), so we shall see.
