Get Ready to Catch a Wave!

Google engineers demonstrated for developers Thursday at Google I/O conference something new and frankly amazing, Google Wave. This new product, which is slated to launch later this year, is a revolutionary Web communication and collaboration tool. 

In my humble opinion from viewing the demo of Google Wave we may be watching 'the beginning of the end' for email as we know it.

Some of the same team that gave us Google Maps (Jens and Lars Rasmussen with Stephanie Hannon) has taken email back to the drawing board to give us a new protocol for communication on the Internet.

So, what is Google Wave and why is it revolutionary?

• It simultaneously enables real-time communication and asynchronous communication in the same user interface -- acting like email when the parties you're communicating with are off-line and acting like instant messaging when they are on-line in the same conversation (Wave).
  
  
• It could ultimately merge all your communication interfaces email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management into one browser based client.
  
  
• It enables real-time multi-user editing of documents / communication with tracking and time-line playback. Key strokes from every participant of a Wave are updated live from all users and visible to all users live.
  
  
• It features drag-and-drop file-sharing to the browser. For example, you can select and drag photos from your desktop right into the Wave in the browser and it automatically uploads and makes the photos available to all participants of the Wave.
  
  
• It features real-time natural language spellchecking! It first automatically changes commonly misspelled words as you type. Then it examines the context of words in the sentence structure to also make changes automatically or suggest alternate spellings.
  
  
• It features real-time language translation of about 40 languages. For example, the demo shows a English user and a French user typing and reading in their native languages while the Wave Robot translates word for word in real-time fixing the sentence structure along the way.
  
  
• It features embeddability into Web pages, blogs, etc. For example, the Blogy extension to Wave enables the posting of a blog featuring live editing and live responses via comments on the blog or by just typing in the Wave client.
  
  
• It features embeddability of maps, videos, gadgets, robots, etc. These are only limited by developers' imaginations.
  
  
  • Gadgets are applications that run inside a Wave such as most current iGoogle and OpenSocial gadgets, games, polls, etc. 
    
    
  • Robots are extensions that add automation to a Wave and allow exchange of data with third parties such as Stocky for stock prices and Tweety, which displays and posts tweets between Twitter and Wave. 

Google Wave will be a free service offered by Google at Wave.Google.com. 

But, don't forget that I mentioned earlier that Google's intention is to make this a new protocol. To that end Google Wave will be open source. Any developer will be able to sign up and download the code to not only develop Gadgets and Robots, but setup entire Wave servers. The architecture will then support inter-server Waves with the same real-time capabilities and additional security features which keep local server Waves and wavelets (private comments in a Wave) on the local server.

Also, notice the user side of Wave is in the browser (the demo used Crome, Safari, and Firefox). So, the user doesn't have to install any new software and doesn't store any data on the local system. This is cloud computing communication were everything is stored on the server and the user is just interacting with the server through the browser.

These two, open source and in-browser, translate into FREE communication software for every organization on the Internet, which could replace every email server and every email client. (Look out Microsoft.)

So, if you have an hour and twenty minutes to spare, watch the amazing demo for yourself (posted below). If you don't, just look at the screenshot and image the possibilities.

Screenshot of the Google Wave user interface.

See the Google Wave demo below.

To read more about Google Wave check out Google Wave or Google Wave: A Complete Guide by Ben Parr for some great, detailed explinations.