TooMuchGreen

Email is officially yesterdays technology. Previously groundbreaking as the quickest form of communication it now lags on the periphery of snail mail terminology due to the instant zip of new alternatives such as Twitter.

Of course collaboratively it’s still the de facto standard for business interaction, but that’s only because Google Wave hasn’t been released and adopted yet. Google Wave? Indeed. After being shipped off to Google’s Sydney office to develop the product in secret the Wave team presented their two year project at the recent Google IO developers conference, I went through the presentation and really didn’t expect to be so impressed. So, what IS the Wave?

Take all the annoyances and shortfalls of bulk project emailing and streamline them, re-invent some old concepts (Operational Transformation), pull in some new ones, add something really cool and re-package it all for delivery through a browser. Print some t-shirts, preview it to a bunch of whooping developers (quite literally) and release it to them as open source, welcome to the Wave.

Obviously that’s selling it way short  and in all honesty you’d do far better to watch the (80 minute) presentation than try to glean the enormity of it’s potential from this meager blog entry, however I’ll try to expand the concept sufficiently to do it justice and push you toward the YouTube Video.

A Wave is a packaged communication module for recorded group collaboration, it runs in a slick browser based GUI environment and consists of messages and related updates through videos, links, text or any other form of digital media you wish to include, it’s member manageable and stunningly instant. You know those awful disjointed long email trails which just grow and grow and become even more disjointed and harder to decipher and confusing to follow as extra information gets added by others reading them at different stages and adding their own opinions before checking amendments they can’t  actually get to anyway because someone forgot to Reply to All somewhere back down the line (BREATHE..!!), exactly, but not an issue with a Wave, you just add your *bit* where applicable and it’s all recorded for staged playback. It’s genius in it’s simplicity – group email with extras and a time-line, expandable and flowing, one instance, one place.

I thought Twitter was  a revelation (and it was/is) but the Wave can streamline connected productivity even more, how about instant real time language translation for a start, and we’re not just talking Babelfish here, it’s contextually intelligent. Previous experience with Maps showed the enormous potential for rapid expansion by opening up a product for 3rd party API development and Google are most wisely doing the same with the Wave codebase. They also need the quickest route for adoption if they’re going to succeed by replacing project email as we know it to become the new global standard for group collaboration, obviously no small undertaking…but…remember, this is GOOGLE.

Aside from envisioned real-time interaction the fact Wave is delivered solely through a browser (ANY browser) could seal the fate of the desktop operating system and the in-box for good (hello Google Chrome OS ?). As you can run the Wave GUI through Firefox on any platform for free with no need for MS Exchange and Outlook Microsoft should (quite rightly) be most concerned, and although they do still have Active Directory it now seems only a matter of time before the centralised security of Linux based desktop virtualisation comes knocking there too, Ubuntu Server is by nature already a hypervisor and KVM support (Kernel based Virtual Machine) has been offered since version 8.10.

Times they are a changing, cloud cover is coming and the surf is rising, looks like it’s time time to wax up the longboard and ride the Wave.