Much has been said and written already about Wave, Google’s breakthrough “personal communication and collaboration tool”, since its acclaimed developer preview presentation at Google I/O on May 28.
I tried to make a list of all the stand-alone Internet services and/or tools whose functionalities Google Wave natively integrates –and which it has pretty good chances to render obsolete in the medium-to-long term:
- e-mail clients (Gmail already did that, to a certain extent);
- IM/chat/conferencing clients and services;
- blogging tools;
- discussion boards/forums (?);
- mailing list management services and tools;
- photo sharing tools and services;
- Twitter clients (Wave integrates quite nicely with Twitter, as shown during the live demo);
- Facebook (!);
- task/project management tools;
collaborativeconcurrent real-time (!) editing, versioning, and knowledge management tools;- wikis/intranets (?);
- rich text editing + spell-checking tools;
- live translation tools (does any live translation tool exist at all??)…
…and I’ve almost certainly left something out (if so, please feel free to comment in).
Add “open-source, extensible, and mobile” to all that, and you’ll start to grasp the kind of disruptive, revolutionary, paradigm-shifting, insert-your-own-techcrunchy-adjective-here thing we’re talking about: something quite closely resembling the idea, or concept, of the World Wide Web as its inventor originally intended it: a universally open and interconnected communication environment, allowing for entirely new forms of online interaction and information sharing.
Much of the success of Wave as a product will depend on how fast early-stage developers catch up with the new protocol and APIs and start churning out cool apps and extensions, Google Maps-style. But to judge from the standing ovation that the San Francisco audience gave to Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon during their one and a half-hour presentation, the future of the Web appears bright.
If you haven’t done so already, watch the video –it’s long, but definitely worth it!
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I’m as usual a little bit skeptic. I mean: so many functionality glued together in a single interface could make the app too complex and keep non-nerd users away from it.
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Come on, real users want to share funny pics of cats and some porn
Hey Alex, I think you can do that too, with Wave!
Jokes aside: of course only time and use will tell, but the user interface shown in the demo looks pretty intuitive to me in perspective, even for non-geeks. I also think it’s the “wave” concept itself that makes complex interaction much easier to perform: besides a seemingly straightforward UI, what really blew me away about Google Wave is the way its designers managed to integrate so many different functionalities within a single shared “object”.
That said, I absolutely agree that the early adopters of Wave when it finally launches will be Internet power users and professionals like you and me: just think about what features like concurrent editing/discussion and integrated versioning could do for your productivity! And both of us know all too well how frustrating it can be to have to use non-integrated, poor usability tools in your everyday work…