Did you know email was invented more that 40 years ago? That is before the web came into existence. It was created, obviously, without the knowledge of communication that we have today.

What if we were able to start from scratch and design email from the ground up knowing what we now know? Just think, being able to take the best concepts from blogs, wikis, instant messaging, social networks, twitter, flickr, youtube. What might that just look like?

Well a Wave is the concept that Google have come up with to potentially redefine how we interact on the web. I took a closer look and have outlined some of the key features below.

I'd like to start a discussion with IBMers, Geeks, Technologists anyone interested on this, what can we learn from this? is the protocol something we can use in our environments? - it fits with an open source ethos, that has to be good right? This is me starting a conversation. Welcome and please join in.

So what does it look like?

The user interface is very google'esq as you'd expect, with basic navigation and contacts down the left hand side of the browser window. Your inbox in the centre and your current open 'wave' on the right.

A Wave conversation is nicely threaded, recipients of the Wave can insert comments or reformat the Wave at any point as opposed to traditional email where you typically add onto the bottom of the message.

It provides character by character updates when both people have a wave open similar to a good IM and the automatic spell check features (something I could seriously use) are pretty cool.

New recipients can be added to an ongoing wave (no need to re-send or forward the original email). The new recipient can then 'replay' the conversation from the original message through to when the recipient was added. This is a very cool feature that brings the recipient bang up to date on the Wave status. Private replies between members of the Wave conversation can also take place.

Attachments such a photos, music any rich media - just drag them into the wave conversation - this feature does require google gears to be installed for the time being. It works super fast, just throw your photos in there and then share with whoever - there is a very nice photo browser viewer / player integrated with the wave.

Waves can be easily added into your web pages or blogs , people responding to your blog Wave will be included in your Wave in your browser so no need to keep flipping back to your blog to look at and respond to comments..

It works seamlessly on iPhone and Android phones (although that was not demonstrated).

Editing is super easy, go in and change captions in the Wave e.g. photo titles, they are updated everywhere the Wave is embedded e.g. your blog, your mobile etc.

Why not create meeting notes as a Wave? Multiple people can work and edit on the Wave (simultaneously I might add), add actions, update text, add images. All other participants on the Wave will see the mark-ups that others have made and who made the changes.

Multiple people can edit the same document at the same time - looks pretty amazing, but scary..fab for live blogging or note taking where others not in the meeting can insert questions based on the notes that are appearing on the screen.

Wave is built entirely on Google Web Kit (GWT)

So how do you organise all of these Waves? There is support for tagging and of course you can create waves to structure and store links to your waves e.g. why not have a project Wave with links to your current project team Waves.

OK sounds good but what about extensibility and did you mention open source?

Google provides client and server side extensions, the developer community are working on developing more of these prior to launch - oh did I mention that Waves is not available until later this year

Client side extensions:
Spelly (intelligent spell check), linky (auto identify links as you type of copy text into a Wave, embed video and music), bloggy (publish Wave directly to your blog, including any updates you make to the Wave subsequently), Searchy (google search from inside Wave and add the link directly or images or anything from the page). Many more of these to come, I am going to try developing a few of these myself over the next few months - I'll let you know how I get on with the experience.

A really simple but very useful "Yes, No, Maybee" extension for polling was demonstrated. As members of your Wave click on the status the results are updated in near real time. They also demonstrated the speed of updating by showing Su Doku and Chess Extensions that could be played within a Wave in real time. Oh and the Google Map map function where a map can be inserted into a Wave and then updated e.g. annotated, zoomed, moved, tagged in real time so other users of the Wave who are online in the Wave at the same time can see that happening - just like a web share - very slick I have to say!

Server side extensions:
Polly adds a form to the wave that can create a really easy but powerful poll that is then sent by Polly to all participants and aggregates the results live.
Tweety, create a Twave (urghhh) that links directly into your twitter stream and of course as this is a pre-beta software there is Buggy to capture bug reports right into your favorate issue tracking tool

The Wave Protocol, APIs and Extensions are Open Source. You could for instance have an IBM Wave server and a ACME client Wave server and interact between the organisations securely - sound familiar to any of our Lotus people? There is a White paper covering the protocol available via the links below.

Oh any probably the coolest thing they demonstrated - Rosy - a translation robot that translates directly as you type, you type in English your lovely friend in Europe receives the text in their local language and vice-versa.

Wave supports the full range of languages, Rosy translates 40 of them.

It's not here yet! It'll be coming along later this year...

Links:
Watch the keynote from Google I/O 2009 if you have 1h 20m to spare
The APIs
The Protocol
Google Web Kit (GWT)


Let's have the conversation?
Why is it important to us?
How might it impact Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Hotmail you name it?
What can we learn from these concepts?
Let's have the conversation - I'd love to hear your views and would be happy to collate and summarise - I only wish we had Wave for this post, from what I have seen it would make things so much easier

ps In answer to my opening question, I personally think it is really cool and potentially disruptive thinking that could have a marked impact on how we communicate.

Comments

[Stuart Moore]

I am a huge fan of Wave and am having a lot of fun in my spare time trying out the APIs to see what even a meagre developer like me can add to it. I have been waiting for this collaborative computing initiative for years. I thought Microsoft were on a slow track, but I am delighted to see Google bringing it to the open source community.

I can see huge opportunities for changes in the way people work.

One area I have been privileged to have a play in has VR meshes communicating through the proposed protocol. The potential for information centric collaborative working that can also exploit the best of the leading MMORPGs is staggering, Welcome to the future.