Google’s Wave. A tsunami? Or a duck splash?

I believe in the wave and it’s heading this way.

Google Wave is Google’s new invention of email. As Lars Rasmussen, one of Google’s major serious geeks says, if you were to invent email today, what would it look like? He and brother Jens were the architects of Google Maps and so have something of a reasonable track record building awesome stuff and after spending an hour watching the Google Wave demo, they have done it again.

What is Google Wave? Well Google it! But if you don’t want to leave this fantastic page, Google Wave is an email that allows people to come to it and add to it as opposed to it going to them. You don’t send, you invite.

People to come to the email.

Like a bulletin board, a wave enables contributions. It’s hosted messaging that enables embedded commenting within the message and embedded threads. It’s like taking Wiki technology and putting it all into an email; but what is really impressive is that it’s a live hosted conversation..IE you don’t just see that a buddy is typing, NO,  you see what he’s typing at the time he’s typing it (you can also turn this off). And that’s pretty cool when you have several people typing at the same time.

So to further explain. A Google Wave object is a blank canvas which they call a “wave” on which you can write messages, add photos and photo galleries and has a unique message playback feature which enables a late comer to the object to see a playback of what has happened so far. And in typical Google ease (or sort of Macintosh like) you can simply drag and drop contacts into the wave to invite them to the conversation (which is the same as forwarding an email).  So think about that for a minute. You and a colleague can craft up a great message, add another contact along the way to help you finish it up and all in live mode. Then when you’re satisfied you just add the original person you were going to “send” this too and then they can start commenting. It’s like taking Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Outlook and putting them all together. You can add any element to the object through dragging and dropping. I.,e drop in a video or excel spreadsheet. You use extensions made of gadgets and robots. Like Facebook apps and Twitter.

You can also have private conversations within the wave if you want to talk about Joe’s birthday party with Sara and Lars, but Joe is already typing about spending the day debugging code.

So far, so cool and a nice reinvention of email; but it gets better when you start thinking of this as a project tool and a collaboration tool.  There is a nice embedding API which will enable you to have a wave on a web page and it will update automatically forming a nice dynamic content piece which your readers can interact with.

Now you can start to feel significant potential here for social media and group collaboration. For non-profits this will be a great breakthrough for on-line collaboration around proposals. One of the things I can’t stand with jointly writing proposals is the lag time between edits, emails and responses. Google Wave enables an instant message type of project management cooperation.  The wave can become the proposal because it can embed charts and graphs and text, and photos and video and be in a state where it is fresh and updateable by multiple members of the team.

If someone makes an error..you can unwind and edit.

For social media (Orkut is Google’s favorite of course) it has great potential for groups to share their experience, photos, thoughts, maps, and whatever… I can see waves becoming more interesting and more powerful than web pages themselves. One of the cool things about this for non-profits is the ability to collaborate on issues and send them out in waves. It is also free (i.e, just another great Google app.) And Google’s open sourcing the technology and inviting developers to build apps for it.

It also has great game potential.

And, if like me, you have a problem with spelling because you type so fast, the wave has a built in language engine, not just a spell checker, but an engine that learns and uses context to suggest..it looks awesome.

Once again I will emphasize the fact that there is only one wave..not duplicates. We go to the wave and not the other way around and so for tracking systems it’s great because you avoid out of sync messaging and problems with version control. You can also have mark ups to maintain a sense of who’s editing what.

So the wave is coming, and it ain’t no small splash..it’s going to be big.

It should arrive sometime in the Fall I believe so start thinking now…. polling, voting, e-commerce, help desk, issues management, medical consultation, disposable blogging….

Here’s an image by Steve Jurvetson, (famous VC dude from Silicon Valley) called friendship…now after seeing this doesn’t it make more sense to invite them all to the center instead of sending out the same thing to them all?

photo by Jurvetson (flickr)

Have fun and be kind out there.

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Tags: API, collaboration tool, e - commerce, Facebook, Facebook Inc, Google, Google Inc., issue communication tool, Joe, Lars Rasmussen, on-line collaboration, social media, Twitter, Twitter Inc, Wiki, Wiki technology