Wave of the future.
Published in the Bangkok Post (PDF), Dec 9th 2009
A new Google product is about to energise your email and online communication habits. Prepare for the surge.
In recent years Google's meteoric rise from popular upstart search engine to global search advertising wealth generator and online services gatekeeper has been dizzying to watch. Since floating on NASDAQ in 2004 Google's share price has travelled stratospherically from approximately $85 per share to today's topping out around $500 per share - and rising... Google's net worth is around $150 billion.The steady accumulation and creation of new hip technologies and online services has been equally spellbinding - look at the list: Google Search, Adsense, Google Earth, Picassa, You Tube, Google Docs, Gmail, Blogger, Chrome, online translation, the upcoming Chrome operating system for PC.... The list goes on. These new information technology tools have become for us what early hand tools were to the roving hunter gatherers of old, or what the Gutenberg press and related distribution systems of previous centuries were for an earlier period of advancement. As the revenue pours in from every corner of the globe - with practically every use of the search engine and related technologies stimulating some type of earning opportunity - the resources to further develop the tools we will come to rely upon and use in our daily lives keep on accumulating. Google also mops up some of the best brainpower on the planet, acting like a magnet for graduates from the top science and technology universities globally. So, what's next? The latest next best thing to burst forth from this Internet powerhouse? Wave. As in the coming wave...
Wave.
Google Wave has been described as email-on-steroids, a new communications and collaboration model for the web with email at its heart. A rich and seamless overlap of email, chat, document collaboration, video-communications, mapping, photos and more. A 'wave' in Google's new information sharing model is a connected and multi-level conversation between you and your friends, colleagues or fellow collaborators. The wave holds your current and previous conversations live in real-time, allowing instant access to information flows and conversation additions at any point in the continuum of a topic, strand or discussion. The wave allows the easy and seamless addition of a variety of multimedia content or files in convenient drag and drop style. Participants can jump in and out of the conversation and bring with them contextual additions and other multimedia content. The live wave can be 'replayed' allowing easy access to any previous or current point of the topic. Participants can jump in at any point in order to comment on or elaborate the discussion. The live nature of the interface also allows the ability to see additions in real time as collaborators add information. Think along the lines of a social jamming style flow of participants and content within a live and interactive dialogue..! Got all that? Ready to roll?
Key technologies
Real time collaboration.
Concurrent control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time.
Natural language tools.
Server based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction.
Extension.
The ability to embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets using Google's Wave APIs.
What does it all mean?
Wave could herald the biggest shake up of email since the arrival of free web-based email services in the mid nineties. There has generally been a divide between those who operate email via stand alone applications connecting to a server (like using Microsoft Outlook at the office) and those utilising web-based services such as Gmail and Hotmail. With many of us using both on a regular basis. Both methods have evolved some great technologies and functionality while allowing the incorporation of a variety of richer media such as embedded HTML or live chat with other users. However both models remain relatively isolated in the sense that users are still distanced slightly from one another via the posting method of send-receive which has been the mainstay of this type of electronic communications for some time - despite of course the blurring of boundaries and a much faster pace of online information sharing habits in recent years.
Google's new Wave product seeks to jump start a revolution in the way we collaborate online in the wake of the social networking storm which has swept the globe in the past couple of years. The ability to move in and out of online discussions and to incorporate our rich digital media content as part of this process and as part of our evolving information lifestyle is what's now being brought out into the open with this latest offering. Wave seems set to act as a catalyst and to shake up our current ideas of how we use email and the web to communicate, work, share and play. It may also stimulate a new way of learning as well as kick start a completely new industry of add-ons and technical enhancements as the technology, concepts and technical underpinnings behind it are adopted across social networks and the web. Using its massive resources and abilities to shape and change future online development and usage Google is directly at the heart of this wave of the future. And looks like being so for some time to come...
Google Wave is set for release at the end of the year.