some thougths about google wave

in the last days theres a lot of fuzz about google wave. if you are interested in new technology you have to see the video. its a great presentation of a very early product state.

try to explain what wave will be: its email, im, chat, collaboration in one sleek interface. and its all in the browser with heavy usage of bleeding edge technology like the not yet finished html 5. in wave the basic thing is a “wave”. consider it like a im/email-conversation on steroids. if you now google mail you should be familiar with its great conversation view. that is showing emails with similar subject grouped together. although the ones you send (i thnk this is the most compelling feature of gmail and i havent found this done right in any other mail client). in wave this is an important feature too. everything is grouped in conversations – sorry “waves”. but whats the difference? the difference is, that every member of the wave can edit the wave on every point in time. meaning you can go back to the initial post and add your message there or append it to the end. all changes can be replayed using a cool history playback.

for a nerd like me it looked all very cool. but i think it is very complex. perhaps too complex for big audience. i think google is aiming for everybody…but the usual user will be overwhelmed by the possibilities. to grasp the hole flow of a conversation over time could be very hard despite the playback. so for now i cant see email going away soon. a very interesating point they didnt mention in the presentation is the spam-problem. also since i am using gmail for a long time now my spam-problems are nearly vanished i think that is one of the most annoying things in email. could they find a way to eliminate that with wave?

but one of the best things with wave is the open source approach. they will open all stuff they already have. the protocol will be open and there will be a sophisticated plugin architecture to add many features (as they showed twitter, bug tracking, chess, sudoku). and what i understand one can host a wave server by himself so the most privacy issues for business could be solved with this as wave wont send any stuff to google that is intranet.

so i am very excited to see how it will be. but it seems we need to wait for the end of the year to see it live.