Google's Wave! Email, Docs and IM, Goodbye!

I'm very excited that I received an Invite from Google today for access to the Wave sandbox. I'm anxious to get started. For those of you who haven't yet heard of Google Wave, the technology is described as "new model for communication and collaboration on the web." You can think of a Google Wave as part communication and part document. The technology combines remote, near real-time collaboration and communication for live sharing of richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. There are also Developer APIs that allow us to extend Wave functionality with robots and embed nifty gadgets.

What's even more impressive is the fact that Google has made this technology open-source (well, not quite yet, but they are slowly rolling it out as completely open-sourced over time). Already PyGo has created their own beta Wave-Server There is even a Wave Federation Protocol that allows third-party Federated Wave servers from different providers to communicate in near-real-time with one-another.

As I said, I just received my Google Wave Sandbox invite today and should have access within the next few days. I can't wait to Wave! You Want to Wave? If you do sign up--or already have access--post a comment here and maybe we can meet in the wavesandbox and do some testing.

Check out the Google I/O 2009 Wave Video:

The Google Wave technology was created by the same team that created Google Maps, down under in Sydney Australia. Essentially, they realized that Email, IRC, IM, etc., were all created decades ago. So they wanted to take a fresh look at these technologies using modern approaches and incorporating more modern technologies such as gadgets, ajax, documents and then to redesign from the ground up.

I can't wait to see how Federated Waves influence the next generation of online content development. Just as OpenSocial has transformed how social networks interact with the Web, now Federated Waves will also tear down traditional 'walled garden' communication and content publishing boundaries. For the first time, we'll be able to realize both real-time synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, simultaneously creating and distributing (streaming) content within many contexts throughout the web. For instance, I see OpenSocial converging with Google's Wave to reinvent how we use social networks, blogs, personal websites, and even twitter...to name just a few.

To summarize my thoughts...Maybe I'm wrong, but I see Federated Wave Technology as being the next step in evolution of how we use the Internet. Forget surfing the Web. Webs are sticky and filled with spiders and relatively static, stale content. But surfing Google's Wave, now that's exciting! Granted, the World Wide Web refers to the interconnectedness of all the world's computers. So the analogy holds true despite the emergence of the wave and in a sense, the Web is synonymous with the physical of the web (i.e. Internet). Indeed the physical limitations of the web were present in the interactions of the software systems implemented on the architecture.

Email is a perfect example, modeled on the archaic Parcel Post system, allowing for document attachment, but separated from content publication. In another example, IRC and IM operated as a means to synchronous communications through the web, but also remained separate from web content publication. As the Web evolved, documents and spreadsheets, as examples, migrated from the confines of the desktop, liberated onto the web. It became possible to collaborate on a central document, even in near-real-time, without having to email copies of a document or maintain several copies. However, the work on the document was still essentially estranged from communications about the document. Granted, sometimes notes within the document itself might indicate communication points, but overall, communications around a document still involved email, IM, or even voice, which all happened outside the context of the document.

But now it seems that a new Application, Presentation and Session Layer Paradigms are changing all that. Now communications, collaborations, content and distribution are all intertwined within a Wave. From the quasi-static Web model, we now see the evolution to a very fluid Federated Wave model. The major difference is unified context. With the old Web-based content model, every form of communication had it's own context and required some automated or manual process to transform data from one context to another (e.g. copy text from an IM, spreadsheet or email and paste into a blog post). However, now we have a universal context that allows for synchronous and asynchronous communications to take place, with accountability, within a single context, and full control and extensibility.

Well, I've gone on long enough, but I guess it shows how excited I am about the Wave. I can't wait to see what becomes of this game-changing technology!

Go Google!