Will the Wave answer the promise of the cloud?
One of the funnest things about working in interactive is the tea-leaf reading that happens when screenshots of upcoming apps are released. Windows Longhorn, the annual Macworld run-up, console releases, game beta screens are fodder for endless speculation, geek-talk, and fantasies of what the new app might be.
Twitter is all a-twitter about Wave today, and normally I would be skeptical, but something in Google’s ability to help me get excited about something in a single page with less than 500 words and a couple unremarkable, unpretty, completely un-Apple-shined screenshots makes me hopeful.
From the site:
What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Frankly the screenshots add almost nothing to the page. The words somehow reflect not only the promise of what they’re offering, but an understanding of the problems that needed to be solved for this to work and the open source ethos of “pick one thing and do it well . . . then do another” which usually result in elegant solutions.
I’ve experimented with a fair number of “collaboration tools” — 37Signals stuff, MSFT Windows Live, Google sites — and am currently struggling with a whole bunch of file sharing/cloud concurrency issues. I’m dying to have a place where I can share pictures and documents with coworkers with easy commenting, versioning, and non-networked-but-secured accesss. The beauty of Google sites was that it allowed people to write HTML in pages that were open to self-organization without the constraints of content management/versioning controls and it was in the cloud. But, you still had trouble with versioning when people got lazy.
If Google gets the rewind action right (presumably that’s what’s Wave-y about it), you’ve got version control built in, along with conversation tracking and a dynamic de-archiving process that doesn’t depend on search (which sucks even on Google apps). The beauty and the hope is that playback and rewind and wave implies a product based on a concept firmly adhered to rather than a laundry list of features that people would like to string together. (Something 37Signals did nicely with Basecamp.)
The real-time collaboration piece is also intriguing, surprisingly so, since we’ve heard that phrase 100 times — “see the changes as they’re made in real time!” (Wonder: how many people understand the phrase ‘real time’ . . . do they actually know what un-real-time is?) Google, however, may have the potential to beat the WebEx client in performance and simplicity if they nail the browser code (I’m starting to pendulum back to a notion that software needs to get back to the browser (even chromeless browsers) for speed, interoperability, and true cloudness).
Weird. I’m not sure I was even this excited about a software launch when Wrath of the Lich King betaed.






I’m a fan of the XO — the project, the goal, the educational ideas behind it. More than that, I’m fascinated by it.


