Google Wave

Google Wave
There will be plenty written in the next few weeks about Bing – the re-named, re-developed Microsoft search engine that Redmond hopes might, just, finally, allow it to grab back some of Google’s market share and web advertising clout.

Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but at the end of the day, it’s just a search engine. SO last phase of the internet.

The irony is that while Microsoft is effectively proving to the world that it is playing catch-up – even if there may be a few technological innovations in Bing – Google, meanwhile, is presenting a convincing vision of the next big thing on the web.

Two big announcements from this week’s Google Developer Conference show that the company appears to be well ahead of Microsoft in its thinking.

First, Google demonstrated how it plans to use HTML 5 – the new version of the ubiquitous web development language that is aimed at allowing the creation of browser-based applications that rival operating-system based software for functionality and usability.

As the web becomes the way that consumers and business use technology, so it makes sense to develop your applications for a browser rather than a complex, hardware-bound environment like, ooh, Windows for example.

Next comes Google Wave, a tool that has been created to answer the question: “What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?" according to Google software engineering manager Lars Rasmussen.

If you want more technical details, I will happily defer to the excellent Tim O’Reilly in his blog entry here, but in essence Google Wave is about redesigning our everyday communication and collaboration tools, such as email and instant messaging, for a future in the cloud.

Wave allows developers to build applications for real-time collaboration and interaction. It claims to try to mimic the way we interact face to face. And it brings together every major internet and technology trend, from cloud to social media to wikis to email and more, into a coherent, managed, human-oriented concept.

Let’s face it, at no time in the history of IT has software been developed with the way people naturally interact in mind – we have had to learn the ways to interact with software based upon the technological constraints of the time.

I can’t honestly say I’ve been excited about the emergence of a new search engine, and particularly a new search brand, at any time in my IT career.

But the vision that Google is this week presenting of a new model of software applications oriented around the web and around real-time real life, is the first time I’ve been vaguely excited by a new technology for a while.

It’s also a vision that doesn’t need PCs or bloated operating systems, doesn’t need hefty software development environments, and bypasses the need for complex PC-based applications. In short, a vision that doesn’t need what Microsoft has been so good at for the past 30 years.

Microsoft is going Bing, but if it doesn’t open its eyes it might one day soon be going bang.



Google Wave is a new communication service previewed today at Google I/O. "A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."


The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games or discuss a recent news.


Google Wave has been designed by the founders of Where 2 Tech, a start-up acquired by Google to create a cutting-edge mapping service, which later became Google Maps.

"Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps. As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point; I was immediately sold," explains Lars Rasmussen.

"In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content -- it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave to see how it evolved."Google promises that Google Wave will be available later this year.

Google Wave

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