This is more a post on possibility than a post on a technology that was mind blowing. Recently Google hosted their annual developers conference Google I/O. The first day they talked about a lot of things and even had an “Oprah moment” giving all 4000+ attendees a brand new unlocked Android Phone and a sick SIM card with nearly unlimited voice and data, but I digress. The second day’s keynote had one and only one focus, Google Wave. But before I go on I want one of those blue t-shirts, if anyone reading this knows how to make that happen, tell me. I’ll even help you move.

So what were we talking about, oh yah Google Wave. Basically this combines instant messaging, email, wiki, and even your word processor all into one document. The biggest point here is that it’s all browser based, therefore the second they release it this software will run on Windows XP, Vista, Apple OSX Leopard, Snow Leopard (if it’s out yet), Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and any other OS you can install a browser that supports HTML 5.0 on. Google is the king of web apps and this is showing off just how they got there.

Like I said this is a post on potential. Wave seems to be very much like chatting on Facebook to me with an added bit of collaborative editing. Things that need to be as cool and as useful as the development team hopes for me to get really into this software are as follows (in roughly the order I care most about them). Instant text display has to actually be useful and help move conversations along in a more rapid and effective manor. I’m going to have to actually use this to find out, I can see stagnant reading along while the text is being displayed, then a wait for more, and then finally going to type the response, or I can see this being more like a couple in a fight and if you don’t say the important thought in the first five words it’s not going to be listened to because the other person is talking already. Hopefully the truth is somewhere in the middle and effective communication can be made. Playback and in line editing need to really work together smoothly to allow linear conversation. If in line edits make Waves harder to read than two 16 year old girls texting I’m not going to want to use them and then it might as well be chatting via email or conventional instant message. There needs to be a way to see that someone is online before you try to engage them in a wave. Otherwise I see a lot of waves starting with “hey are you there” *5 minute pause* then follows a lame e mail like message that would have been better said with the other person there. Or really now that I think about it and our modern world, lots of “hey are you online” “no” “OK I’ll text you.” Talk about a potential for lots of wasted time, effort, and storage space.

I know Google showed this at the conference and gave out sandbox accounts to all the developers to foster early development, and that should make for great things, but here’s an idea that Google should work on if there isn’t a developer team that really likes the idea, voice chat. If you’re going to use collaborative editing to make documentation and you expect people to be working on it together you need to let them talk to each other. Yes you could use in line editing to achieve similar things, but a code review, the early stages of specification creation, the late stages of documentation creation, these are all times where I have sat with a group and talked about the document in front of us. And we were so all over the document I don’t think that in line comments would have gotten the job done. If you could talk, in line comment, and edit the document all in one program then you’d have a strong communication program that I would really like to use.

Also of note is Google committing this document to open source. Not only did they decide to make Wave into an open protocol so that anyone can create there own wave server, they are going to release most of the code for their UI so that once you convince your penny pinching boss to buy the server for the system you have a starting program to work off of instead of having to tell him that he has to pay you to make a communications program from scratch before he can use it. Also different wave servers can talk to each other and they only share wave information that is absolutely necessary. Security was really thought out well for this protocol. About the only thing you have to fear is a local security failure (hack or just noisy operator) but then I will just point out what I’ve always held true about computer communications. If you wouldn’t be comfortable telling the whole world, don’t say it on your computer.

EDIT: I forgot to add links: Google Wave homepage: wave.google.com

Wave Protocol homepage: http://www.waveprotocol.org/