Welcome to the Blog -- Google Wave

Welcome to my blog!  It seems that a lot of the technology blogs out there today are written by older members of the community, although I have no problem with this I think it would be good to have a younger person's view that has grown up with all the technology in our world today, hence I started this blog.  Two of my favorite technology companies are Apple and Google so there will probably be a lot of posts on the activities of these two parties.  I will try to post a new topic probably about every month.  Enjoy!


Speaking of Google that brings me to my first topic:

Google Wave:


Wave has received a lot of press in the last year since it's epic introduction at the 2009 Google I/O Conference. Why did this introduction receive so much press? Was it because of the real-time collaboration?  The multi-media integration?  Or was it the possibilities presented by the architecture to build extensions and bots to participate and enrich the waves? Maybe it was one of these but I don't find that to be the reason it received so much attention.  The reason this announcement received all the attention it did was because of one very simple, but extremely bold, thought that the Google developers told the audience.  Google was attempting to replace email.  The infrastructure that connects modern businesses together was suppose to be replaced by this system that failed numerous times in an hour and a half demo? Surely Google was nuts, right?

Really going to replace email?


So is Wave really going to replace email? I say nay, at least for many years.   This is the power of Google though, they have the funds to build up a system just to throw it out in the wild to see if it actually works.  This thought process can also be seen in Google's 20% time policy.  Although Wave did not originate as a 20% project (that I am aware of) other great Google products did(Gmail, Google News, Adsense, etc), this shows what can happen when you don't think of the business model when developing.  However, I digress.  So if Wave isn't going to replace our email what is it good for? The answer is this: document collaboration.  This is where the beauty and the power of Wave comes in.

So what makes Wave different than other document collaboration products?


It is true that there are already some great real-time document collaboration products out on the web today such was EtherPad (which Google has acquired to contribute to Wave). Although on the surface there are many differences what makes it such a paradigm switch is two things.  1. Google has the muscle to push real-time collaboration to the general public like has never been really accomplished. 2. More importantly, Wave is an open system just like email is.  Just as any email server can communicate to any other email server all Wave servers will be able to communicate with  each other through the Federation protocol.  This is where Google's dream of replacing email has it roots.  Google realizes that companies and the public will not want Google to host all of their content because of privacy concerns therefore this allows corporations to run their own Wave servers behind their firewalls and the public the freedom to choose which Wave provider they will use just as they have the freedom to choose their email provider: Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, ISP, etc.  However, I don't want to belittle the surface level differences that Wave has from other document collaboration systems either.  For instance I am not aware of another system that has such extensive multi-media integration, the extensions, or the bots that Wave employs. These will only grow in power as Wave has more and more work put into it.

My defense of Wave.


I would like to finish just by defending Wave for a moment because it seems in the recent months that Wave has come under more and more scrutiny and skepticism which I believe it does not deserve.  I find that these complaints stem from the thoughts of people as they use Wave with the mindset that this will replace email.  That is the wrong outlook.  Wave is a paradigm switch and in so being it requires a change of how people think of completing tasks and communicating with each other.  I have heard comments on Wave such as: That's too hard, It's just really fast instant messaging, etc.  These shallow views of Wave need to be overcome before a person can see the magic.

Here is how I have used Wave:

For one of my projects in my college I created a wave for all the members of my team to post our schedule, go over ideas, and include all of the necessary files.  Part of our planning even included having a VOIP call(originated through a Wave extension) going on between all parties as we edited the wave.  This created a environment of working which I have never seen.  It was extremely productive and instant.

Planning of a vacation:  Some friends and I have been planing a senior trip and in so doing we have had all of our travel accommodations planned out in a wave.  This has allowed us to have one central place to look for all of the necessary information including embedded screenshots of flight information, links to different transportations systems, maps of where we will be staying and points of interest, etc.  This has made it extremely simple to keep everything in line.

School Notes:  This has been the most magical experience of my Wave career.  For four of my college classes I have created a wave to serve as a note-taking platform with the number of participants ranging from 2-6.  This has allowed us to be able to write notes and if one of us misses something in the lecture there is always someone to back us up and write what we missed.  It is also extremely nice to be able to embed the slides in individual blips (Wave terminology is a bit strange) allowing for the group to comment on each individual slide.  The inclusion of bots has made it extremely easy to also pull in external data. For example, I always include the bot Wikify allowing, with a few keystrokes, to automatically pull in Wikipedia articles for unfamiliar data or the bot KaSyntaxy to automatically do syntax hilighting for my CS classes.

Wave is something that you need to have in your hands to truly understand.  As my father tells me, I can't complain about something new until I have had to live with it for at least two weeks.  I challenge any of you that have access to Wave to give it another try and for those of you who would like to try Wave I still have some invites.