Gmail in real-time: Google does the Wave
When recipients respond to Wave messages, everyone on the thread sees the replies as they are being typed.
(Credit: Google)
Updated 12:28 p.m. PDT with additional comments from Google.
Google is ready to start talking about its answer to demand for real-time--yet organized--Internet communication.
Google on Thursday publicly demonstrated Google Wave for the first time at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Billed as "the e-mail of the future," Google Wave is the result of a multiyear project inside of Google to reinvent the inbox, blending e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and perhaps, with input from developers, connections to the world of social networking.
Lars Rasmussen helped lead the development and demonstration of Google Wave.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google Wave is an attempt to "combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication," said Lars Rasmussen, who launched the project with his brother Jens after Google acquired their mapping start-up in 2004. The brothers Rasmussen said they were inspired by the fact that two of the most commonly used Internet communication technologies--e-mail and instant messaging--are based on relatively ancient offline communication techniques, namely the letter and the telephone.
The Rasmussens were given the authority to create "one of the most autonomous independent groups we've had at Google," said co-founder Sergey Brin in a press conference following the demonstration. Given the success the brothers had in developing the technologies behind Google Maps, Brin was inclined to "give them the benefit of the doubt" when Lars came to him pitching a bid to reinvent Internet communication.
They came up with Google Wave, which organizes Internet discussions in the trendy stream of consciousness fashion. It's a little bit Twitter, a little bit Friendfeed, and a little bit Facebook all in one service, allowing you to send direct messages to online contacts with real-time replies, share photos or documents, and add or delete members of the conversation as needed.
In that sense, it's not a completely public discussion, nor a completely private one. A user creates a "wave" by typing a message or uploading photos and adding contacts to the wave as they see fit. Other contacts can be added later, and those people can add other contacts to the wave unless the original wave starter forbids new entrants.
"Each person that we show it too, something different resonates as useful" to their way of communicating on the Internet, said Stephanie Hannon, project manager for Google Wave.
At the moment, the functionality is somewhat limited, but Google is introducing Google Wave at its developer conference for a reason: "a lot of this depends on developer uptake," Rasmussen said. The company will release APIs (application programming interfaces) at the conference so that developers can start testing how to build Wave into their own sites, or how to integrate their services with Google's.
Google envisions three types of developer projects using Wave. The first is the most obvious; using Wave as a gateway for conversations that you're already having elsewhere on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, blogs, and other social media sites.
There are plenty of reasons for Google to try to tap into the "stickiness" of various social networks, where users spend obscene amounts of time. And the company thinks that services such as Twitter recognize the value of letting others build a front end into their services: there are dozens of Twitter apps for PCs and smartphones that grant such access without having to use Twitter's own front end, and those apps don't seem to have put much of a dent in Twitter's overall traffic. For starters, Google Wave will allow users to post new items to blogs created with Blogger from within a wave, and see comments and replies within a wave.
E-mail, instant message, wiki, or nanoblog? Wave combines elements from all of these communication methods.
(Credit: Google)The second category involves creating applications that run within a wave, similar to how developers have used Facebook as a platform to create all sorts of applications. Collaborative games are expected to be among the first applications to appear within Google Wave.
Lastly, Google wants developers to think of Wave as a possible enhancement to an existing workflow within an enterprise. The example Rasmussen used was a bug tracker used by software developers to identify and assign bugs. Bugs could be organized in waves; participants post the new bug to a global wave, then the team leader can assign bugs to individual team members within the wave, and developers can comment on their fix for a particular bug as they are tackled and cleared, all within the same thread.
The software has a long way to go: Google is releasing it as a developer preview on Thursday, and is actively looking for feedback on how it can improve. Sometime later this year Google expects to release it to the general public, but Rasmussen would not commit to a more specific timeframe.
Google also plans to open-source the format at the heart of Google Wave as a protocol in order to let developers build their own waves. The company has not determined the license that will be used to open-source the code, Rasmussen said.
Developer feedback will be crucial toward gauging the impact of Google Wave in a marketplace crowded with similar ideas. For months, Google has been pressed with inquiries about whether or not it plans to buy companies like Twitter or others that specialize in real-time Internet communication, and thus far, the company has demurred.
Now we know why.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
by Mr. Dee May 28, 2009 9:50 AM PDT
Looks like a useless Outlook wannabe to me.
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typical end user type. Can't think beyond today. You're probably the type of user that I have to smack with a bat all the time because they can't understand how things evolve for their own good. Once its evolved then the reaction is "oh now I get it".
I like companies that keep moving forward and creating new and better products. Kudos to Google and Apple, and some other companies as well. But not Microsoft.
snoozeville.
I've used Outlook for many many years - once upon a time even managed an Exchange server. Lars hit the nail on the head when he noted that today's e-mail model (Exchange/Outlook) is 40 years old. GMail left Outlook behind several years ago, but it's now apparent that it is merely a transition to Wave. I'm truly excited!
This is almost making me foam at the mouth.
Also looks like we might eventually have a decent replacement for Google Talk and Hello.
As if time wasn't already being wasted enough through all of the social networks...
Whenever somebody gives me their yahoo address, I always look at them again and wonder to myself; 5 years on and he doesn?t know about Gmail??? Since the day Google made emails a conversation, there?s been no reason to use hotmail and yahoo. Even Outlook 2007 can?t match Gmail 2004 lol lol
Seems Google is going to be consuming all social networking competition Microsoft style...
I also can't see Wave as corporate tool. Who guarantees data integrity and backup? Another corporation which will by all means index your content?
Plus, if you are worried for backups, data integrity and security, install your own wave in your own servers.
You might want to check out the demo video of Google Wave. It really does look interesting.
My simple net out is that this is a model that deals elegantly with both messages and payloads, where the payloads could be pics, videos, posts, songs, maps, people/product/business listings, etc.
As such, there is a lot of value in how the handling layer processes these messages/payloads, enabling them to be aggregated and/or filtered into logical constructs, like NOW, LOCAL, TYPE, POPULAR, VIRAL, ENGAGING, etc.
I blogged about an application model that is very complimentary to this (and for which I have modeled out six very specific use cases) in a post called:
"Right Here Now" services: weaving a real-time web around status
http://bit.ly/i40h
Check it out if interested.
Mark
Kind of like taking the Lynx Version of WWW into Mosaic!!!
Nothing new here!
It does look interesting, but we shall have to see how it works.
What am I missing? I do that with Skype every day - instant response.
Now GMAIL is great and it has it's uses BUT BUT BUT it's not for wide enterprise use (yes, there are some wins but I can count them in the 1000 clients I have on 1 hand).
And another but, the concept of re-inventing stuff that works has been around for a while and Google are very innovative. This is not a big broken piece in the enterprise. It is great for people that like to Social Network but not for business... It's too intrusive... Business users should not and must not work that way, it makes them very unproductive. I should know, I see it in my employees...
1) No client application. How many man hours have been spent just dealing with clients and their email issues.
2) No server infrastructure: Again, man hour black hole.
3) General Administration: GONE, dont have to deal with backups, servers, drive space, etc.
1) No client application. How many man hours have been spent just dealing with clients and their email issues.
- of course there is client application, your browser.
3) General Administration: GONE, dont have to deal with backups, servers, drive space, etc.
- NOT GONE. just less. transferring your email into the clouds doesnt mean no admin @ all. What goes away is the troubleshooting. other admin work stays put.
The times are changing. the bloated Windows desktop has no place in the future. A simple thin netbook running a web browser is all you'l need in a few years.
The next step should be the flattening of the globe to get rid of the time differences nuisance...
- by Anysia May 29, 2009 2:32 AM PDT
- I have never used outlook, or outlook express, as I had read about the huge security issue with them both, so I can't say one way or another about its appearance as I have only had a passing peek at it. Saying that, the UI might look the same, but I am betting it's not going to have the same vulnerabilities that Outlook or OE had.
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