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Google Wave – What is that again?23. July 2009 – 11:14 by Bengt Feil |
In May 2009 Google presented the Wave project to the public simply calling it “a personal communication and collaboration tool” at the Google I/O conference. The presentation of the project was 80 minutes long which hints at the fact that Google Wave may be more complex than what it is referred to in the short explanation. Given Googles announcement that Wave will be opened up to a public beta in September and the major buzz this project gets on the internet I will try to sum up what it is about and what the implications may be. If you want to get an in depth overview of Wave please watch the Google I/O presentation embedded below.
https://www.youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ
Google Wave will try to combine all the online communication we know and use into one interface and to organize communication threads by context and topic as opposed to communication tool. The different tools for this new approach to online communication will be familiar (e.g. email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management) but the way the communication threads are organized are different. All communication activities related to one topic is called a Wave. As part of this Wave there can be endless amounts of communication activities (called Wavelets) using different tools with different groups of persons. Wavelets can be real time (e.g. instant messenger), asynchronous (e.g. email) or collaborative (e.g. wiki, shared document) and can include all kinds of media, links and even widgets (like small games etc.). The interesting innovation is that the Google Wave is able to recognize that all of these communication activities belong to a certain Wave which helps to overcome the fragmentation of online communication. Mashable.com made a great graphic to illustrate these concepts.
The Wave software itself is browser based. Therefore users do not need to install additional software and can access their Wave account for any computer. The technical basis for the inner workings of the whole system is the Google Wave Federation Protocol which is based on the open XMPP Standard. This underlining protocol is open to be used by anyone in their software and web services and sets the standards for interoperability between different implementations of the Wave idea and there the Waves and Wavelets themselves. Detailed technical information can be found in several Whitepapers already released by Google.
One thing is very important when looking at a project like this one: Either the Wave idea succeeds completely and rises to be the definite way of online communications or it fails. If it is only adopted by a few onliners it will fragment the web even more as Wave Users will not able to communicate with non-Wave users. Remember the times when you could not send an email from AOL to CompuServe (or even today trying to send a IM from Skype to any other IM service)?
Right now it is not clear if this concept of communication will be able to convince both users and developers and be able to succeed in a world where email is still the dominant online communication tool. But tools like Facebook and Twitter have shown that there are parts of the online population who are interested any willing to learn and use new forms of communication. Furthermore there is a strong feeling among many onliners that email is far from being perfect or mayby completely broken. Taking this into account there may be a window of opportunity for an idea like Wave.
I will revisit this topic when Google Wave is in public beta and try to look at its implications for eDemocracy and eParticipation in a future article. Right now I would like to know what you think: Will the Wave idea be a success?
Tags: Google, Google Wave, inenglish
