Google Wave

I just watched the whole thing (one hour 20!). I'd read some negative comments about Wave on twitter (particularly Jeff Atwood's notorious one about how this was "the most Microsoft like thing Google has done, and I don't mean that as a compliment"), but having watched the presentation, I think those people must have been watching a different presentation. I started watching it thinking that it was going to be another 'meh' thing from Google, but I've come away thinking I have seen the future of internet communication.

Some takeaways:

• It's more interactive than current IM systems.
• It has message permanence like email.
• It has change tracking and playback like Word.
• It integrates into blogs and social networks pretty seamlessly.
• It has an apparently very flexible plugin API that allows you to leverage the real-time synchronization of the Wave platform by just supplying it with XML.
• It has some really impressive functions already built using this plugin API, including a spell checker that makes me wonder why none of my desktop apps have something that powerful when this web app has it.
• Google (apparently) want these protocols to be the successor to email as well as current IM systems. To that extent they have designed it so that everything works across servers, anyone can set up a server, the protocols are all open *and* they are open-sourcing the software.

btw. note the audience reaction. That's what spontaneous applause sounds like the audience is genuinely impressed with what you're presenting. Contrast that with the embarrassingly forced applause extracted from the PDC audiences with awkward silences.

Having said that, they did milk it a bit at the end, but still, it didn't make me cringe like some of the PDC videos I watched.

If you use a non-Google hub and communicate with other people who are doing likewise, none of the messages ever get routed to Googles servers. That's what I mean about doing it the right way. It even does this to the extent that if you have a wave that involves people from several networks including Google, but someone not on a Google server sends a private reply to someone else who's on their network or on another non-Google network, just that tiny part of the reply is kept off Google's servers.

I don't think the importance of this point can be over-emphasized. There are many reasons why businesses haven't gone for hosted apps in a big way, but a large part of it is privacy. There might be tons of tools they'd like to use out there (another one Wave will nuke from orbit it 37 Signals's Campfire and Basecamp products), but they want to host it themselves. And usually when a solution is available for self-hosting, you then lose the ability to interact with users outside your own network because all these hot Web 2.0 developers aren't smart enough to cook up server federation protocols.

Maybe you should have watched the whole thing then. Duh.

OOhh, very Microsoft company-man response

Seriously though, there's nothing on the desktop or web that's as well thought out as Wave. I hear a lot of people saying things like "feature X,Y and Z are nice, I guess, but I don't see what the big deal is about" or "X had feature Y so it's not really innovative".

This to me is like people saying when DVD was released "oh, it's got a better picture and commentary tracks and doesn't wear out and you can skip about and it takes up less space, but I don't see what the big fuss is about when  I can already watch movies on VHS. Besides, Laserdisc already had stuff like commentary tracks and chapters". That would sound pretty dumb in retrospect and all this Wave naysaying is going to sound really dumb when it is the main protocol for communication online in a few years.