Our Scrap Book
Next generation of surfing: Google Wave
2009-06-15
Maybe you've already heard about Google's new and pretty radical approach to mailing, instant messaging.. and.. so on.
By the end of this year, Google will launch their first version of Google Wave. However, they have already published material, as well as held several presenations, also available on YouTube, and developer communities are buzzing with how this will impact on how we work and interact online.
It's interesting that they went open with the project already at this early stage and are inviting developers to participate in the process. Maybe unusual, but clever, definitely. When Google Wave is launched, there will already be a supply of peripherals, work templates and plug-ins available.
So what is actually Google Wave?
Emailing is, believe it or not, about fourty years old and has basically worked the same way, since it first saw daylight. The two Danish brothers Rasmussen at Google, amongst other things the chaps behind Google Maps, were mulling over how it would look like, if mailing was invented today.
That's at least the advertising story. One condition for things to look like they do today is of course that mailing existed and looked like it did yesterday. But perhaps we shouldn't get too philosophical.
Wave integrates mail with instant messaging services like GTalk, MSN, ICQ, etc and also does it in real time. Apart from that, it looks like Google Docs, one of the web alternatives for your Microsoft Office software, will also be included. "Drag and drop" functions are thought to make working with the interface intuitive. Quite likely, other services or applications will be ready for inclusion as well, like Google's RSS-reader, aptly named Google Reader.
The basic concept, if we disregard all the tech-talk and details about different services, is that we move away from the old ways of email conversating. You know, I write a mail, you reply, I reply, you forward, I reply, she replies, and so on. A bit like digital ping-pong.
Wave is meant to give us a more multi-dimensional conversation, where you and I start a dialogue. I may not be online at the moment, but that is no problem, because as mail, it is stored and marked unread, until I open it.
If I'm online, we can both have an IM conversation, invite someone, who, if he or she has time, will chat with us, or recieve the conversation as a mail. We can drag pictures straight into the window, or open a Word document in the middle of our chat and work with it together, simultaneously.
A flow where you do not need to constantly jump between windows, or wonder which spreadsheet in the folder is the last version, followed by a frantic search in your Outlook.
It may seem a bit chaotic, especially since we've become adjusted to work in a chopped and fragmented way (which I guess we should thank old Adam Smith for), with all its consequences.
But if you have 80 minutes to spare some day, I can highly recommend seeing the presentation on YouTube. Lifehack also has an article, Google Wave Questions and Answers, which is also recommended.
Sinclair Andersen, Symmetri
Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009 at Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
Lifehacker - Google Wave Questions and Answers
http://lifehacker.com/5288931/google-wave-questions-and-answers
Screenshot from
http://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/googlewave/home/screenshots-and-media-5
