Flour Power

After being involved with computers and the web for quite a few years now, I hardly ever get too excited about new products that are said to be completely innovative and capable of changing the way we'll do things from now on. That's because they end up being just small improvements to what we already have been using. And now Google Wave is approaching...

On the 2nd day of the Google I/O Developer Conference, Lars and Jens Rasmussen (the creators of Google Maps) unveiled what they've been working since 2007, after asking themselves the question "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?". The result is Google Wave, which could be described as something that mixes the functionality of email, instant messaging, social networking, wikis and blogging (and I might have forgotten something...) into one single protocol. Sounds confusing and messy? Well, it isn't, and that's the beauty of it: it just makes so much sense! Just watch the demo to see everything in action. It's a bit long, but well worth it:

Impressed? I know I am, and I just wish we could start using it right now! The question on my mind now is how this will tie with email, because we can't expect everyone in the world to immediately dump it to start using Wave.

To make it even better, Wave won't be just another Google product. It's also a protocol and a platform:

The Google Wave product is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

And now all we can do is wait...

For more information:
Google Wave - The product home page, and where you can sign up to be notified when it becomes available.
Google Wave API - The API, documentation and code samples.
Google Wave Federation Protocol - The protocol, whitepapers and discussion forum.