Google Wave - a new era for communication

Just watched the Google I/O 2009 Keynote Google Wave demo, and it was pretty impressive. In short, Google Wave is a new platform that allows developers to rapidly create a dynamic communication system, fully integrated between web and desktop. Google provides the open-source platform which seamlessly integrates all the common features of email, IM/chat, and document collaboration/processing into one communication thread that they call a "wave". Each wave is dynamic, that is it's state is constantly monitored by the wave server, which syncs all changes made by any client immediately. It tracks the complete history of the wave, and allows each client to "play back" the history, change by change, to review all activities of each wave.

Waves can contain plain text, rich text, audio, video and pictures. They are all treated similarly. Comments and changes are accommodated in a very intuitive fashion. In this way, collaborative edits/comments/changes can be managed very simply, allowing multiple wave participants to create a document/note/etc. which can then be distributed in "final form" via a new wave to others for final viewing, all the while retaining the rich history of each wave's pedigree.

The Wave platform provides APIs for client and server-side extensions. Server-side extensions, called robots, can participate in waves just like their human counterparts, mining each wave for data which can be used to make the wave even more valuable and productive to both the participants as well as the owner of the service. Several robots were demoed, including Spellee [semantic spell checker], Linkee [automatic weblink generator], and Rosy [way cool 40 language, real-time auto translator]. These things were real and live on stage.

The platform supports federation between servers, so you can set up your own Wave server for your community, and federate with all [or none] of the other Wave servers [including the ones Google owns and runs]. This way you can extend your reach dramatically!

For more info, check out wave.google.com for the demo of the video keynote. You should also look at www.code.google.com/apis/wave to get into the wave api effort. Another key link is www.waveprotocol.org to participate in the open wave protocol.

This is very interesting stuff. Wave-based properties should start becoming real later this year!