For crying out loud! Even the New York Daily News is talking about Google Wave. In the past day the News and hundreds of other mainstream news organizations all over the world have been falling over themselves about Wave. But does the average reader of the NY Daily News -- or, for that matter, Atlantic Monthly or the Hindustan Times -- really understand what the fuss is all about?
Probably not. Mention "collaboration" to most people, and their eyes will glaze over faster than you can say "Lotus Notes training." Even if you were to show them some of the demo applications, such as the Wave-borne planning session for a fictional boat trip that was described in the Wave developer introduction at Google I/O (see video below starting at 7:30), the universal reaction would be, "Big deal! I can already do that with email/IM/Facebook."
But some will start to wake up and smell the coffee when they see Wave showing up in their workplace applications and other places that they browse online. For instance, the second video below shows a Wave/Salesforce mashup that a call-center rep, a customer, and other call-center staff use to resolve a trouble ticket. Others will begin to get religion when they see how Wave can be integrated with existing websites -- including blogs and media sites -- to share comments, pictures, and other data, without having to deal with logons or even revisiting the site. That's because comment threads live within the Wave client even after the user has left the site. As Lars Rasmussen, one of the lead Wave developers noted during the Google I/O demo, "[It] will make flame wars so much more effective." That's something that many New York Daily News readers would even appreciate.
Video: Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009
Video: Salesforce.com and Google Wave
Sources and research: Google I/O and Salesforce videos, Google Wave developer blog, NYDailyNews.com, Computerworld.com
Image: Lars Rasmussen, Google I/O 2009 (video screen capture)
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Comments
Re. Atlantic Monthly - maybe they wouldn't understand. Hindustan Times? They wrote the XMPP parsers. (grin)
Agreed on all other points. You want to get IM, tweets, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, photologs, mashups, everything into the enterprise and onto mobile devices and reframe the whole dialog about measuring 'conversation' on the web, this is the way. Nice, clean, open protocol for everything.
That said, what's also enormously interesting about this is how it commoditizes the internals of essentially every communication/collab/social media paradigm and makes everything else a user-interface contest in the browser. Doing UI for Wave services is clearly not trivial -- not least because of privacy/security considerations that make Wave 'terminals' into their own Social CSRF hotspots by blending semi-private and private and public data in active threads (look at the way an email turns into an IM, into a group IM, and contemplate the many ways a snarky aside to a colleague could become part of a thread readable by your boss). I wonder if - once we have a Wave infrastructure and are busily cranking about how we can't live without Wave but hate it - somebody will come along and do for Wave what Apple did for .mp3 and phoning. Devoutly to be wished, I guess.
Thanks, John, for the thoughtful comment.
One thing you said that I think deserves further exploration is "Doing UI for Wave services is clearly not trivial." I was thinking more broadly -- doing any Wave services is not trivial. I am wondering where the developer brainpower to enable these services/mashups is going to come from, particularly considering Google already has lots of platforms that need developers (such as Android) and every other big player in the Web, mobile, and social media spaces (Apple, Facebook, Yahoo) is clamoring for attention, too. How big can Wave be if there aren't enough developers out there to execute on the platform?
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
twitter.com/the_standard
twitter.com/ilamont
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