Google Wave

I’m not sure who might have already heard about Google Wave, but I’d like to share some thoughts. First some groundwork (only 2 paragraphs, not an epistle).

Groundwork
I often lament the difficulty of finding information that’s stored in numerous places. One has to be an information search guru, spend huge amounts of time sifting through mounds of data, and visit dozens of information repositories to find things. Wouldn’t it be great if I could search in just one place and find the information no matter where it is? Many thought we might have a partial solution when federated searching was first brought forward, but it hasn’t been that helpful.

When we want to get support on a product or service, we are faced with choosing the best form of getting that support—email, phone, self-help FAQ, self-help Wiki, Forum, live chat, etc. By offering support in so many ways, companies are trying to meet everyone’s needs, but perhaps they are diluting their resources and hiding what the customer needs by having it in only one of those tools, which may not be the one the customer selects. Wouldn’t it be nice if the customer didn’t have to select which tool to use, but could be directed to the help they needed in the format they desired?

Random Thoughts
In a way, one could call these two dilemmas examples of problems with information silos. Last week at Google I/O 2009, Google announced a project that has been going for a couple years called Google Wave which is intended to cross silos and remove barriers. The basic idea is to make the same content available across all formats & tools—and have it updated in all formats and tools when revised in any of them. There’s a lot more to it, but I can’t describe it without starting somewhere. What makes it exciting is that it’s Open Source. Google was engaging developers at the I/O conference to start writing extensions or even competing applications.

Google Wave allows collaborative editing. Instead of saving a document and letting people edit it one at a time, everyone looks at the same “document” at the same time and can edit collaboratively at the same time. Picture a meeting (physical or virtual). The group decides to make a list of some sort. As one person adds item 1, another is adding item 2, and a third is editing what the first person wrote on item 1 even before they come to the end of the sentence. Sounds a bit chaotic, but it has potential to facilitate virtual meetings as well as significantly shorten the time for collaborative authoring and editing.

Google Wave combines e-mail, instant messaging, and document and image sharing. It also improves it by making it real-time. You don’t’ have to see the “John is typing” message and wait for the IM sender to hit the send button, you see what he is typing as he types it. When recipients respond to Wave messages, everyone on the thread sees the replies as they are being typed.

Wave can let you post an e-mail you received to a blog (using an extension creatively called “bloggie”). If the author of the e-mail fixes a link or does some other edit to the original e-mail, or someone cc’d on the email adds a comment, the blog is automatically changed at the same time. If someone leaves a comment on the blog, it is added to the e-mail, even in the original senders “outbox.” It no longer matters whether the communication is a blog, email, tweet, IM, chat, or whatever, the content is what matters and is preserved.

There's a great extension called "spellie" (creative, aren't they?) which is a natural language spell-checker. If you type an IM saying "where r u, we bean waiting, but had to order. Their bringing been dip now," spellie will fix it to read "Where are you, we've been waiting, but had to order. They're bringing bean dip now." That's right, it knows bean from been and their from they're.

If someone is in a forum and finds an answer somewhere else to a forum post, they can copy and paste from wherever they found it. When that original source is later updated, so is the answer on the forum. Everything stays in synch.

It opens news ways to aggregate – you can automatically gather tweets on a subject into a wave (they called it a twave). Google wants developers to think of Wave as a possible enhancement to an existing workflow within an enterprise. The example 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 bug tasks to individual team members within the wave, and developers can comment on their proposed task solution or fix for a particular bug as they are tackled and cleared, all within the same thread.

The demo was captured live and is online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ. It's a long one, so here's a few timestamps for some key points:

20:42 - link to content in a blog, or pull blog content into something else (forum, wiki, e-mail, webpage...)
36:30 - More than one person can edit the same "document" at the same time, with each seeing each others typing real-time.
1:02:30 - Link e-mail, blog, wiki page, or whatever, to an answer in a v-bulletin forum, and have the forum automatically updated whenever the linked item is updated or commented on (example given bug tracker)
1:13:30 - Rosie, an extension which translates instantaneously as you type to/from over 30 languages


I’ve also included below some comments found on blogs:

Technologizer:
[Wave takes] what e-mail should be and melds it with IM, allows for real-time document sharing, provides instant photo sharing, revolutionizes spell checking, provides on-the-fly translation, and allows developers to either build on top of the service or replace it with their own underpinnings, among other things.

Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu:
The part about Wave that excites us at Zoho is the interoperability it can bring to collaborative applications. While data formats are open and you can export/import out of Google or Zoho apps, from a real time collaboration perspective, these are still somewhat islands. Wave is an ambitious attempt to standardize the underlying real time protocol & rich document collaboration. If this attempt at standardization succeeds (a big if, I agree), it opens to way for a whole new set of applications.

Joel Dehlin (LDS-CIO) –
Wow!