Google Wave

Attention Google fans: A soon to be released Google service is making waves. Literally. This service could potentially replace email, chat, and some other collaboration services...and wrap them all up in to one smart package.

Recently announced at the 2009 Google I/O conference, Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration app, that combines components of email, chat, social networking, blogs, discussion forums, photo sharing, and more. It is kind of like communicating...the Google way. Email after all is a very old platform, and so their engineering team set about to update internet communication and their thinking was influenced by current forms of online communication.

Email basically starts with your email message (a text file), and pushes it out to one or many users. Then, that file is updated with a reply, and the text file is sent back out around the internet. This type of strategy creates many headaches, like security problems, spam, failed email, file attachments, quotas, and more. With the current compute power of Google, and the fact that computers are always online these days, a new improved model has been created.

The concept is hosted conversations, called "waves". Rather than pushing an email text file from server to server, the entire communication thread is centrally hosted. Friends are invited to the wave. Wave updates are seen in real-time, character by character as they are typed. Photos are shared with a drag and drop ease. Friends that are invited to the wave in the middle of the conversation can see previous posts. Certain posts in a wave can be set to private, and on and on the functionality goes.

Since Google is opening up the protocol, the hosted waves can be on the Google server or your corporate server or any other service provider. Nice of them. I wish they would do that for Google Docs too! Anyway, it is quite a donation to the internet community, and I'm excited to see if and how this new service improves online communication.

Signup to be notified when it is launched: services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup
Google Wave home page:  wave.google.com