Google ‘Wave’: a new communication platform that will affect how iPhone photos are uploaded & published

Update: If you are sceptic about Google Wave, you might want to reconsider. According to a Google blog update, Wave will launch on September 30. Already 6,000 developer accounts have been rolled out, with 20,000 more to be approved. This is HUGE. Joe will stay on top of this story, for sure!

At its I/O conference last week, Google unveiled its new ‘Wave’ communications and collaboration platform and set of APIs. Like you, I hear about lots of ‘the next greatest’ things on what seems like a daily basis. And, probably like you, I think ‘blecccch’–there are probably 5 people in the world who will really care about that. Lotus Notes and Twitter are both examples of things I either don’t understand or don’t understand why they get the hype they do.

In the case of Google ‘Wave’, though, I have to say that I was blown away. I don’t say that about many alpha/beta projects, but this one is major.

What is Google ‘Wave’ exactly? Well, let’s let Google explain it:

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we’re inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) 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.

Our take:

This new communication & collaboration platform was created by the same Rasmussen brothers who created and implemented that little-known location-based service called “Google Maps”, so, right there, you know this isn’t the plaything of some guy with a fetish for web 2.0 mashups that will tell you whether Jupiter is aligned with Mars on April 27, 2130.
Any one of the things that ‘Wave’ will do would be noteworthy and impactful, but taken as a whole, the platform has the opportunity to alter, fundamentally, how we interact online and make it better–I will go into more detail on this below.
The platform will be open-source and so will allow small developers to create very useful and cool applications and services without having to start from scratch–they can piggyback on a complete platform that incorporates a tremendous amount of functionality into one web-based browser interface.
Google understands that third parties will have unique visions and bring applications to the platform that the Rasmussens haven’t yet thought of and will further evolve existing usage models.
It will take the paradigm of ‘upload and publish’ of your photos to a whole new level of efficiency and power–you can have a standing wave (no pun intended for all of you acoustic engineers out there) that involves photography and publish your photos by dragging and dropping them onto that wave. Everyone else who subscribes to your photo wave can then have those photos instantly show up in their browser.
Imagine, for example, that you take a series of pictures at a party and you want to publish them to a wave which includes other people invited to the same party. You shoot the pictures and then drag the ones you want to share with the overall group to the wave. You then pick a particular invitee in the wave, start a new wave and then drag a different picture–that you only want to share with that particular person–to the new wave. You’ve just published photos all from your iPhone using simple drag and drop and a few button-clicks. You don’t have to enter a single e-mail address. Moreover, you can do this all from within your iPhone browser.

It also revolutionizes the concept of communal photo albums, because it provides a very central and effective way of multiple group members each contributing content to a shared repository that is organized and accessible to all members of the group. This will mean that you no longer have to publish your photos to multiple online repositories and point others to them. You can have one set of photos that you publish in parts to several existing waves (for example) consisting of different audiences. There will be no need to have photos on Flickr, Facebook, your own blog. Instead you could have separate waves for separate locations and as you add the photos to the waves in one central browser interface, they get published to those other locations automatically. This looks to work for videos, audio, gadgets, etc. My guess is you could provide an embeddable link to a Youtube video or a map from Google Maps.
A wave can be a blogging tool, too. So, not only can you write or post media to a wave via your main messaging window, but the wave can be published to your blogging site and as you update the wave, you update the blog too. Moreover, as other wave participants add comments, those can get posted to the blog as well.
Social networking–the waves can hook into popular social networking platforms like Facebook. So, again, you can have discussions or 1:1 exchanges and manage them from your ‘wave’ browser window and have them published to your Facebook site–but you don’t have to go to Facebook yourself to edit.
As you can gather at this point, it’s all browser based–nothing to download or install and available anywhere, including your iPhone browser. You will have all of this functionality available from your mobile browser.
It presents a new non-linear thread paradigm (I know that sounds pretty wonky, but sometimes you have to go with the jargon, you know?) in the sense that I can be added to a thread late in its evolution, and insert comments into the dialog represented by the thread after any entry even if it came before I joined the thread. Thus, I don’t have to respond only to the latest post, but can go back and spawn a new thread (if I choose) by commenting on a post that was made much earlier in the textual conversation. Moreover, once I start the new wave, I can invite a whole new set of people to participate that might or might not be the same group as were already in the conversation.
This feature alone will greatly impact forums and community conversations.
If I join the conversation late, I can rewind and replay the conversation to understand who said what when and how it evolved to its current state. I can do this by overall conversation OR by an individual participant to see only, for instance, what “Robert” said throughout the conversation.
Wave integrates calendaring and group organization and so essentially provides ‘eVite’ on steroids. I can arrange group meetings, parties, etc. very easily using my contacts, schedule, e-mail, calendar, etc. all from within one location.
It changes the IM paradigm from wait-until-I’m-done-with-my-typing-to-read to we-can-all-type -and-read-together-without the wait. Now, if you’re over 20, you may not think this is a cool feature, but I will go out on a limb here and conjecture that the teenagers I know will be very happy to have this and will come of age expecting this kind of paradigm.
It offers real-time translation into other languages as you type.
All instances of waves and wave servers can be federated. There are many positive implications to this that I won’t go into here.
‘Spelly’ a spellchecker that uses the web as its reference database.
A built-in system for document management and collaboration. Again much could be said about this and its impact on web-publishing, but I will come back to this in another post.

I will write more about this but wanted to tell you about it if you haven’t already heard about it, because while it may not change the way you shoot pictures with your iPhone, it may well change many of the things you do with your photos once you’ve acquired them and want to share them with others.

Also, see the excellent TechCrunch overview of Wave.

Try to watch at least the first 30 minutes of the video above. IMHO it will take at least that long to get the full flavor of what Wave can do.

I believe that this will be big in 1-2 years and that developers will start very soon to build new and cool apps based on this platform.

There are snarky people who will say this is a geek thing that will not impact the average webizen. Let me disabuse those snarks of that notion–it will affect the average webizens in a good way.

Will Google track high-level behaviors and insert ads in various places? Probably.

Am I saying that Google is Mother Teresa because they are creating this very cool platform and open-sourcing it? No. They are a publicly traded company that has to make money–but so is Microsoft (Just so you know, I’m a shareholder in Microsoft but not in Google–go figure), and Microsoft isn’t creating anything remotely like this, though Surface is pretty cool in a different way.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

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Tagged as: Analysis, google, messaging, Relevant Technology, social networking

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