Google's Wave of the future is genius, but will it work?
Five days is an eon in Internet time. Given the huge amounts of discussion that Google Wave has earned online since the company unveiled it in an 80-minute live demo last week (as I write this, it’s the top of the 15th inning and Excitement and Skepticism are still tied at 7-7) I could be a little bit embarrassed for waiting so long to talk about it.
But I had to let it simmer. The demo was too good, too exciting. Any well-planned demonstration of an upcoming technology sends you out of the auditorium all riled-up, ready to grab a rifle with one hand and a banner with the other and God help anybody who stands between you … and … and … um …
And then it’s a day later and you’ve had a shower and a hot meal. You realize that this new thing is largely like many other demos you’ve seen. Most of those never lived up to the hype. Some never shipped at all.
“Only time will tell,” you muse.
Okay. Well, it’s been a few days now and I’m just as amped-up about Wave as I was on the 28th.
I imagine that there are as many pitfalls to defining and explaining Wave as Westinghouse and Edison found when trying explaining the concept of the electrical grid to the masses. You plug a light bulb into the socket and the crowd oohs and aahs and assumes that Electricity is all about illumination; it’s a marvelous way of producing light without the open flames or soot of candles and oil lamps. Technically that’s true, but it misses the point.
The full-length video of the developer demo is above and you can check out the official site (http://wave.google.com/) where you can also sign up to be notified when it’s ready for the public. A cursory viewing could leave you with the impression that Wave is a replacement for email and chat. But email and chat are just the light bulb and the toaster. In truth, Wave is an ambitious, brand-new infrastructure for communication in general.
Take this very column that I’m writing. Moving thoughts from my head to your eyeballs requires three or four different communications systems. I write the column here in my word processor (1). I email it to an editor (2). He or she makes some changes and if they’re big enough, I get a phone call or a separate email and we talk them over as I make changes (3). It then goes from my editor’s desk to the Sun-Times’ webserver and the mysterious part of the operation that publishes it on paper (4).
The Sun-Times Twitter (@suntimes http://www.twitter.com/suntimes) account broadcasts a link to the article when it’s been posted. I’ll probably re-Tweet it to my own 20,000 followers (@ihnatko, http://www.twitter.com/ihnatko) which we’ll call 5.
It would indeed be possible for me to use Wave the same way that I use email. But then I’d be just as clueless as the middle-manager who uses email like handwritten letters … printing them out on paper, adding some handwritten notes, and then mailing or faxing it back to the sender.
No, here’s how this column would be produced using Wave:
I have a browser window open that looks almost identical to my Google Mail window. I have an “inbox” of fresh Waves (well, if you must think of them as “messages” then go ahead … but I want my objection noted).
Just as with a conventional Inbox, the newest Waves are at the top. Waves with unread contents are highlighted in bold.
I click a button and create a new Wave. An empty editing pane opens on the side of the window, looking almost exactly like a new email message.
But it’s a rich-text editor that supports media and fancy formatting. I write my column. When I’m finally ready to give it to my editor — or at least ready for him to stop worrying that I’m only an hour from deadline and I still haven’t filed yet — I quietly drag his icon into the Wave.
Over at the Sun-Times, the Wave of this column appears in my editor’s Inbox, highlighted in bold. He clicks it to take a look.
Oh, damn. Technically, the Google Wave demo is only 80 minutes, not 90. I should have caught that error.
Before my editor’s very eyes, the “90” changes to “80.” The Wave is a “live” communication that I’m sharing with my editor any anybody else we choose to bring in. I’m still free to edit it. Finally satisfied that I have indeed crafted a Perfect Gem of flawless Truth, Beauty and Wisdom, I head over to the kitchen to fetch a celebratory Diet Dr. Pepper.
My editor quickly spots at least one line that causes grave concern: a sentence in which I intimate that Lars Rasmussen, Google Wave’s Software Engineering Manager has often been seen tramping out of a secluded wooded area carrying a shovel and a filthy empty burlap sack roughly large enough to stuff a whole human body in. He adds an instant message-like note: “It this true? Or are we going to get sued over a bad joke?”
I return to my office, beverage in hand. I note that the Wave containing this column is now in bold and at the top of my Inbox. I click and see his note. I add a threaded reply, also IM-style, sheepishly acknowledging that I was just having a bit of fun.
I see her typing him response to me, letter for letter. Good, he handled that well. Then I see the offending paragraph vanish.
(But how do you keep on top of all of these little conversations and changes? Each Wave has a timeline at the top. You can “reverse” or “fast-forward” through the timeline as though it was a YouTube video, witnessing the Wave change and evolve.)
My column has now been edited. My editor drags another participant into the Wave. This new guy is actually a little piece of software called a “robot,” located on a central server. The robot can now share in the process. This particular bot adds this article to the front page of the SunTimes.com site, without any of the private comments between me and my editor.
What?
Oh. Did I say that this software is called a “Widget”? No, no: it’s a “Robot.” Damn and blast. Well, I mean, it’s a day later and I’m at lunch with somebody besides. What can I do about it?
Well, I can get out my iPhone, open up my Wave client on the phone’s built-in web browser, and make the change. And come to think of it, I now have a really great screenshot of Wave in action. I drag it into the Wave right where I want it to appear.
My editor — who is still part of this particular Wave — sees it immediately in his Inbox.
Oh, and remember: the “put this on SunTimes.com” robot is part of the Wave. He sees that change, too. So my edits immediately reflected on the website. In fact, anybody who happened to have been reading the column at the time could see each of those changes being applied, at the very instant that I was making them, one at a time.
They can’t change the article themselves, of course (anarchy!) but there’s an unbroken pipeline between myself, my editor, and SunTimes.com.
Wave defines the standards, the architecture, and the mechanisms for making the above example happen. In fact, even the “Google Mail-like window” I described isn’t Wave. It’s merely the way that Google has implemented its own standards into something useful.
Once again: Wave is electricity, not illumination. It’s “communication” and not any one specific way of communicating anything to anybody.
I should mention that nothing in the above example was speculative, either. Everything you saw was stolen directly from Google’s presentation. In the demo, these features supported a very email-ey type of conversation between three people who were trying to pick a movie to see later that night, and a project team that needed to collaboratively write and assemble a company report. The fact that these same features and user interface could just as easily put content on the news site of a major newspaper shows you something about the scope of Wave.
It even forces you to adjust your definition of “communication.” While watching the presentation, I suddenly came to think of a chess game as nothing more than an interactive communication between two players which could easily be articulated as a Wave.
And almost as soon as I completed that thought, Google demonstrated a chess gadget. The wave contains a standard chess board. The game software is a bit of code located on a remote server; neither player needs to download and install anything. If the two players are both online at the same time, they can see pieces moving and react immediately. And if not? Well, when Sheldon gets back from lunch he sees that the Chess Game With Raj wave is now at the top of his Inbox, in bold … meaning that after three hours, Raj has finally made his next move.
Wave is hugely ambitious. Which means that it’s bound to fail.
But I’m betting that it’ll thrive. Wave is open and infinitely-extensible, and those are the two things it most needs to be.
Google says that they’re open-sourcing “the lion’s share” of the code that makes Wave services work, and they’re keeping no secrets about its standards.
Google will provide Google Wave services to everybody in much the same way they provide people with free Google Mail today. But just as you don’t need to rely on Google for email, you don’t need to rely on them for Wave services. If Yahoo! wants to add Wave services to their offerings, they’re be perfectly welcome to do so. If the Sun-Times wanted to have their own private Wave server, hosted by one of their own computers in their own office, that’s no problem, either. That would have been a stumbling block for many companies.
Communications between me and my editor — each of us with accounts on the Sun-Times’ Wave server — would never leave the building. And yet I’d still be able to communicate interactively with every other Wave user on the planet.
All of the mechanisms for expanding and enhancing Wave are also free and open. There aren’t any limits on what a web-based or Desktop client app can do. Conventional email, Twitter, Facebook, the responses you leave on blogs, and even voice mail can all be integrated into the Wave experience with the right third-party extensions. Your Aunt Estelle won’t have a clue that the email she sent you from her AOL account was read and replied to via Wave.
Mind you, integrating Wave with other communications services is just the dull stuff. Some of the real fire of the Google Wave demo video — the “grab the gun and the banner” moments — comes at the end. A guy is sharing a Wave with someone and having a live text conversation. A robot is automatically translating all of the text so that the English speaker and the French-speaker are seeing their own native languages. And the translation is happening while they type.
Onward, sons and daughters of the Motherland! Arise! Take arms, and … onward to … to …
(Sorry.)
Of course no one can say what will become of Wave when it’s rolled out to users sometime around the end of the summer. It could prove to be much less than the demo. Let’s not forget that the humans are a baffling and unpredictable species that doesn’t always know what’s best for itself.
Tuesday evening, NBC dropped the Stanley Cup finals for “I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!” to name but one example.
But all of the elements of success are here. Google isn’t the only company with the smarts to conceive of Wave, but it’s certainly the only company that can possibly pull off a revolution of this scale.
Microsoft could have thought of it. But they’d have argued internally about ways to monetize it. Apple could certainly have thought of it. But then they’d have argued internally about the need to keep the technology proprietary and to control and limit everything, including the future of the standard and the scope of what people are allowed to do with it.
Both companies would have ruined it. Google seems to be doing everything right. They’re defining Wave, but then they’re more or less letting go of it. The sole benefit that they seem to be retaining is their 18-month headstart on the rest of the developer community.
My hopes are high. Wave has the potential to be as familiar and well-known to the common user as TCP/IP, IMAP, or Java. These are technologies that you use each and every day in a hundred different ways even though you may never have heard those actual names before. All you know is that your email and your Amazon shopping cart and your Twitter feed are up and running. Why should you care about the underlying technology?
That’s exactly as it should be. Sophistication isn’t about a million beeping lights and the audible grinding of thick gears. It’s a system that Simply Works, and which makes you wonder just how the Humanity managed to get along for so many years without it.