Get excited about Google Wave

As the world’s largest search engine, Google has monumentally changed the way we use the Internet.

Now, we can look forward to a new communication and collaboration tool compliments of this search engine powerhouse due out later this year.  From the guys who brought you Google Maps, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, comes Google Wave.

It was introduced by the sibling engineers and Google Product Manager Stephanie Hannon at the Developer Conference in San Francisco this past May.  Definitely check out  Google Wave Demo from the conference.  The video is a little long, so here’s a summary if you can’t find the time.

Wave essentially blends traditional e-mail with instant messaging and heavily prides itself in the real-time transmission that the team worked so hard to create.  But Wave is so much more than the instant transmission of thoughts and ideas.  The heart of Wave is its ability to give users a space to collaborate and have conversations, and does so with a heck of a lot of cool features and applications.

21^st Century E-mail

Designed to be the creation of e-mail if it were invented today, Wave uses what Lars describes as “a lightweight tree structure of messages and a set of users participating in that conversation.”  If you know Facebook, Wave uses a similar strategy.  It lets you reply to anything written in the wave just like ‘commenting’ on wall posts.  This allows for the original message to be broken up so replies can be specifically aimed at each of its parts.

Once a ‘wave’ is opened, users are allowed to invite participants by dragging them in from a list of contacts who can then view and contribute to the wave.  If a participant is added in the middle of a conversation, the “playback button” gives them the chance to see the conversation from the beginning as its messages appear in the order that they were written—really cool, but also a helpful feature.

And remember, you don’t have to be present at all times. You can leave and check waves just like e-mails or choose to participate in real-time chat like instant messaging.  Wave even gets rid of that “Robert is typing…” business, and shows recipients what you’re typing as it’s happening to speed communication. (Of course,there’s an option to keep your replies private until sent for those indecisive typers.) Keep in mind all of this happens in one place. The same ‘wave plane’ always remains—how you decide to use it is up to you, which makes it perfect for both work and personal use.

The team is even encouraging other servers to duplicate Wave and are willing to give anyone the template for easy facilitation. They want to change the face of e-mail and the Internet, and handing over their creation to the online world will definitely do it.

Share Anything on Your Wave

If you want input on a document you’ve written or have some notes to share, your coworkers or friends have the ability to edit anything right there in the wave.  Their edits become highlighted so you know what has been changed, and you can even use the playback button to watch the progression of revisions.  This is a great way to utilize the real-time feature of the Wave.  You can use the plane to work together while discussing reasons for changes.

Screen shot: List of contacts on left, wave opened on right with participants above

Wave can be fun, too. Took a lovely vacation in the Costa Rica and want to share the experience? Drag your pictures from your desktop, iPhoto or wherever they’re saved and place them right into the wave.  It’s that simple.

The real-time and collaboration feature becomes prominent in picture sharing because multiple participants can share their own pictures in one wave and then view them all in one album. Everyone is able to edit captions, too, and they are all updated automatically.  You can even edit simultaneously with others, which Lars admits was the hardest thing to perfect.

You can also play games and explore the Robots that push Wave above and way beyond regular e-mail.

Robot Extensions

Not only does Wave allow for this easy transfer of images and messages between users, but you can add Robots as a participant to enhance usage. Here are some examples:

• Bloggy: Embeds the Wave into a blog.  It allows others to respond and join the conversation on that blog, which is then relayed back to the Wave.
• Rosy: As you type, it translates your words into any of 40 different languages automatically. It also supports international languages displaying their respective characters like in Chinese and Hebrew.
• Polly the Pollster: Creates any poll you can imagine; (Best movie of the 80s, what to order for the company picnic, which ad campaign to use, etc.)  All results are updated automatically and displayed with a results graphic in the administrator’s wave.
• Twitty: Connects with your Twitter account and lets you see all your tweets in a wave. You can reply to any of them and see the updated tweets on your actual Twitter page, complete with @messages.
• Buggy: Highlight anything in a wave and it is automatically stored as a bug.

Collaboration is the backbone of Wave’s revolution in e-mail conversation, and I think the concept is surely going to set the precedent for future servers.  The feel of social media will fuse with our everyday e-mail use to create an entirely new experience.

Some do argue that it may be too complicated to convert e-mail users.  But if this mindset were true about the Internet, our use of the Web would never evolve–and we all know that’s far from reality.   When people begin to discover all the great things it has to offer I’m sure Google will find itself with another big hit.  Now all we can do is wait and spend some quality time with our regular old e-mail servers before Wave pushes them aside and takes the throne.

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