The Fifth Wave: Google's Real-Time Collaboration Tool ...

Review

At VanDamme Associates (soon to be fka VA), we like our social media. Besides being blogging and Twitter fanatics, we integrate websites and Association Management Systems with various social media platforms, including ThePort, Go Lightly, and our own Ektron Group Application.

An up and coming player on the social media horizon is Google Wave. Although it is not available to the public now, Google announced a developers version at Google IO on May 28. Google Wave is presented as an open-source, real-time communication platform, combining elements of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management. Google Wave looks to be an elegant, in-browser communication client that anyone can use to bring together a group of friends or business partners. The group following the wave can discuss topics and share files – in real time, character by character.

Along with the real-time dimensions, Wave is bringing extensibility, embeddability, and sharability to the table. We will be able to embed a Wave in any blog or website, and we can also build widgets or gadgets that utilize Waves. Like today’s wikis and Google Docs, anything written within a Wave can be edited by anyone else.

Visually, a Wave resembles a rich, web forum. Appearances aside, there are key differences.

  • Everything is shared. While some web forms allow for editing of posts, being able to edit everything, wiki-style, is part of the Wave DNA.
  • Not everyone is human. The environment includes helper robots that access the Wave as if they were collabators. Some of the robots already in service include Debuggy (an in-wave debugger), Stocky (which pulls stock prices based on stock quote mentions), Tweety (the Twave robot, which displays tweets inside of a wave), and Spelly (a natural language spell checker).Files are first class citizens. While forms and email system often support attachments, we will be able to drag and drop documents and images into a Wave. Within a web, images are presented in albums, sound files can be played, and documents are shared.
  • Plugins are seamless. Gadget and widgets can be designed to work within a Wave – including rich applications like issue trackers – and other platforms can embed a Wave into a page, much the same way we embed YouTube today, to create, for example, a instant chat room or talk-back channel.
  • Playback’s a breeze. Wave’s playback feature walks-through how the entire conversation developed from the start, player-piano style, making it to figure out “how we got there from here”. For someone joining a Wave-in-progress, Playback is a great catch-up on the thought process.
    But, the strangest bit about Wave is that Google is not only enabling collaboration but competition. The “lion’s share” of the product will be available as open source, and there are already basic, non-Google hosted implementations of Wave. Once Wave becomes generally available, companies will be able to install third-party Wave implementations on their own servers and retain control of their own collaborative assets. If a discussion takes place inside a intranet firewall, it can stay within the firewall. (Or, alternatively, just let it ride on the Google cloud.)

At the moment, there’s no published schedule indicating when Google Wave will be made available to the public. But, it is real and already available to bleeding edge developers. For more, check the resources section.

Resources