Webware

The support of developers at Google I/O could make or break Google Wave, and the early returns are positive.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--When developers are comparing your new product to the unveiling of the iPhone, you know you've probably got something on your hands.

Such was the reaction at Google I/O in the hours following Google's first demonstration of Google Wave, a bid to redefine the way people communicate on the Internet by blending e-mail, instant messaging, file sharing, and collaboration software into one service. Following a session in which developers were given a peek under the hood at the technology and what it might let them do, several were quite impressed and already pondering what Google Wave would allow them to create.

"I haven't been this jazzed since the release of the iPhone," said Michael Rexroad, a software engineer with Cisco's telepresence systems business unit. He was referring to the way ideas immediately sprung to mind Thursday morning regarding how to use the technology demonstrated Thursday to create new types of applications, much the same way Apple's first public demonstration of the iPhone in January 2007 inspired a generation of software developers.

Developer support is crucial to the success of Google Wave. The company is releasing Wave as a developer preview to attendees on Thursday, and it is still filled with lots of rough edges, bugs, and incomplete details.

But the genius behind Google Wave is not in the individual parts, rather in the way Google has assembled a set of existing technologies into an attractive platform for developers, said Andreas Schobel, chief technology officer for mobile start-up 3Banana.

A demo of Google Wave at Google I/O

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Schobel compared Wave to how Google Maps (perhaps not coincidentally developed by the same people behind Google Wave) awoke developers to the possibilities presented by Ajax technologies, which had been around for some time but had yet to gain traction as some of the core technologies used to build the modern Web.

Daniel Jefferies, president of Newmind Group, a Google Apps reseller, is not a developer, but was intrigued by the possibility of using Wave as an internal tool for improving the productivity of his company. Newmind provides consulting services for helping small and medium businesses implement Google Apps inside their groups, and thought he could better manage his team, their tasks, and their relationships with clients with this sort of tool.

Perhaps the most ringing endorsement came from a software engineer employed by one of Google's rivals, who declined to be identified for obvious reasons. "This will revolutionize e-mail," he said.

While that may be a stretch at this juncture, developers filling the halls of the Moscone Center are definitely buzzing about Google 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.

Updated 12:15 p.m. PDT with additional comments from Google and Mozilla.

Corrected at 12:57 p.m. PDT: This post initially mischaracterized Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. They are all open standards browsers.

SAN FRANCISCO--Google spent Wednesday morning trying to get developers excited about the next generation of Web technologies by showing off how future Web applications will mimic desktop apps.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt kicking off Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco Wednesday.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

"It's time for us to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that is before us," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, kicking off Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco. Schmidt was referring to the growing sense that the Internet and browsers--rather than a computer's operating system--will be the future foundation for application development.

The industry isn't quite ready for that yet. Many of applications demonstrated before the crowd of around 4,000 developers will require the widespread adoption of HTML 5 technologies, which are still under development by a consortium of companies and organizations.

Still, Google's Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering, noted that the four modern open standards browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome,and Opera) are all adopting some HTML 5 technologies as they become more stable, taking every opportunity possible to ding Microsoft's Internet Explorer for lagging behind the other four browsers.

However, offstage after his keynote, Gundotra downplayed any conflict with Microsoft, noting that its task in moving toward HTML 5 is more complex because of the large number of enterprises running Internet Explorer, and the possibility that internal applications developed for that browser could break. "As they follow through, they are going to have a huge impact on moving the Web forward," he said.

Photos: Inside Google I/O

Gundotra showed off how Web applications will be able to take advantage of five main HTML 5 concepts: canvas tags, video tags, geolocation, application caching and database, and Web Workers.

For example, canvas tags help developers bring all kinds of sophisticated graphics to their Web applications without having to use a plug-in--which is also the appeal of the video tag. Google showed off an "experiment" with YouTube videos coded using the video tags, which gives developers quite a few more options when it comes to how those videos can be embedded into a Web page.

Geolocation is another huge topic of late with mobile applications. Google showed off how its Google Latitude application takes advantage of a new iPhone geolocation API that Apple will release as part of the iPhone 3.0 software to run in the mobile Safari browser. Mozilla's Jay Sullivan also showed off how Firefox 3.5 will come with a button that allows the browser to pinpoint your location in Google Maps using Wi-Fi and cell tower positioning data.

In a briefing session following the keynote, Google's Matthew Papakipos, engineering director, said Google has various aspects of the HTML 5 capabilities demonstrated Wednesday in different parts of the development process. For example, the canvas tags that allow for richer graphics are present in Chrome 2.0, which is currently available, but others, such as the video tags, are farther away from reaching the world.

Mozilla plans to support all the HTML 5 technologies demonstrated Wednesday with the release of Firefox 3.5, Sullivan said. That is expected to arrive fairly soon.

One interesting question, perhaps saved for another day, concerned how, or if, Google plans to index the coming wave of Web applications as part of its search efforts. Attempting to index these rich applications at the moment presents quite a "challenge" for search bots trying to figure out how to categorize the content within an application.

"Content won't be a problem, but how do you index Gmail? Should you index Gmail?" Gundotra pondered.

Google's Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering, speaks Wednesday to the I/O crowd.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

If you want to add news about the NBA playoffs to your Web page, Google has come up with a new easy way for those without a computer science degree.

(Credit: Google)

Google has made it easier for novice Web publishers to spruce up their sites with feeds of Google's products.

Google Web Elements, set to be unveiled Wednesday at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, is an easy cut-and-paste way to add a Google News feed, for example, to a Web page. The company plans to demonstrate the service later on Wednesday at the conference.

Web publishers have been able to add such feeds to their sites in the past using Google's APIs, said DeWitt Clinton, technical manager of Google's developer relations team. But using Web Elements is a much easier process; if a Web site publisher wants a customized Google News feed, say, they just select the type of feed, type in custom categories, and cut and paste the resulting code into their Web page code.

"We're trying to nail the simplicity story," Clinton said. It's not clear yet whether or not this is something that professional publishers would want to add to their site, or just a tool for individual bloggers or small businesses; Google's main focus in the early going was to make the process as easy to understand as possible, he said.

Google Web Elements was expected to go live here at 9 a.m. PDT Wednesday. Eight feeds are available at first, with more possibly to come over the next several months.