Google’s Wave is better than you think.

... If you think like me. I use mutt for email, and TeX for “creating documents”. I think Twitter and Facebook are idiotic. So when I see something shiny and breathlessly “collaborative” like this Wave¹ thing, my first inclination is to shrug it off as another toy for the kids. I idly wonder if it will be around long enough for its inevitable security blindspots to be exploited, and then I go back to my curses applications and my snuffbox.

But I heard some things about Wave that sounded interesting, so I skimmed the video presentation² . The one thing that makes this important is openness: not only are there APIs that will allow you to extend, embed, and use the Wave technologies, but you can run the thing on your server and be completely detached from Google. Wave is not merely a set of applications, but a new communications protocol, so the Wave stuff running on your server can communicate with Waves on other servers.

Wave was created by some of the people who made Google Maps, which is undeniably cool and useful, and also has a generous API; they seem to have done it again, in spades. I'm not going to try to describe what this is, as they do a fine job of that, but instead mention what seems most exciting about it. For instance, the open source and rich API means that someone could (and might have already) figured out how to let Wave coexist with my beloved archaic email infrastructure. In fact, here is a shot from the video showing a command-line implementation.

The presenters, by the way, who, I think, included the brothers who started the company that was bought by Google and whose product became Google Maps, provide a heady mixture of repulsiveness and charm. They were wearing wholly unnecessary Wave T-shirts, and I was intrigued that they seemed to have identical sweat marks, until I realized that the Wave logo was supposed to have a shadow beneath it. I liked them; they didn't take themselves too seriously, but it was obvious they knew they had created something good, and the audience of developers was obviously impressed.

The Wave creators seem to have thought deeply about conversations on the internet and how to make them more useful, from truly intelligent spell checking and real-time language translation (see 1:13:40 or thereabouts in the video) to how to handle the problem of a thread that arises from a reply to something in the middle of an email. “Waves” can be embedded in web pages so that comments thereon can be unified with (whatever replaces) email and other messages. Keyboard shortcuts can be used, something that makes Google’s Reader and Gmail so much easier to use. The API and protocol even allows games to be played over Wave: see the chess game here.

As I think I've made clear, I'm not easily impressed by new ways to gossip on the internet. But the nature of Wave as a set of APIs and a protocol rather than someone’s closed, corporate-bound web service makes it important and relevant. The serious thought that has gone into this, not to mention Google’s brand, gives it a good chance of becoming something big, and actually replacing the disconnected array of communications channels (chat, email, web comments, etc.) that are starting to segregate people who just happen to prefer different technologies.

Other Articles

Wave, as such no longer exists. But it will be reborn,³ in some form: “we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware.”

Pros & Cons for Google Wave in Academia⁴ .

Google Wave Invading Corporate Processes: Two⁵ companies⁶ fold Wave into their processes. I’m not sure what they’re doing, but it’s an interesting development.

Google Wave Embed API Improvements: Viewing public waves without a wave account⁷ .

Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google’s Wave⁸ : Balanced and informative writeup of the technology behind the Google creation and prospects for the future. Contains a rare intuitive description of the workings of the Operational Transform.

Lars Rasmussen presents a very personal From Australia to the World: the Story of Google Maps & Google Wave⁹ .

Sam Ruby: Google Wave¹⁰ : He goes into a few intreresting issues (for exammple, the implementation of unicode) a bit more deeply than the current round of excited journalism.

Nick Gall¹¹ : Some original insights, comparing Wave to Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project.

Andy Ihnatko¹² : A rare piece of recent journalism about Wave that actually contains some insight. But can you read it? For a while the Chicago Sun-Times wanted to make you pay after the article had aged for a month, as they regard aged news as more valuable than recent news. But it seems that it has aged sufficiently now (August) to be free again.

Flip Tanedo¹³ writes on the website of the US contingent to the Large Hadron Collider, musing on the applications of Wave to scientific collaboration. He touches upon mathematical collaboration and LaTeX (there is a LaTeX extension to Wave!), as well.

Anil Dash on Google Wave¹⁴ : Mr. Dash has good wishes for Wave, but is pessimistic about its adoption, because “the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.” He has an interesting argument, pointing out along the way that one of the foundations of the Wave protocol, XMPP, “is way too complicated for any normal human to deploy”.

Julie Bort¹⁵ has an interesting discussion of the possible effect of the rise of XMPP on the direction of network development.

I’ve written a wave robot that draws sparklines¹⁶ .

In an article called “Google Climbs to New Heights of Arrogance With Wave,” Jordan Golson provides a perfect example of missing the point¹⁷ . He worries that Wave might not succeed because Google management have not figured out how to monetize and promote it. He mistakes Wave as a product, rather than as an open system of clients and protocols, and so fails to see that even if Google were to abandon the project tomorrow, it could still be used and would even be capable of widespread adoption.

According to Christian Zibreg¹⁸ , Wave feels like a native application on the iPhone, partly because it is optimized for WebKit and partly because it exploits “app mode,” which hides most of Safari’s UI.

What problems does Google Wave solve?¹⁹ , by Daniel Tenner: A detailed look at the headaches that result from trying to collaborate through email, and how Wave seems to provide a more natural solution.