Making Waves: Google and the future of email
by Wayne Pretl
On 28th May 2009, Google announced its grand vision for the future of internet communication. By harnessing the power of HTML 5 – the next major revision to the core language of the World Wide Web – Google is putting the final touches to a brand new “personal communication and collaboration tool” for a brand new era. It’s called Google Wave.
As a real-time communication platform, Google Wave combines email, instant messaging, web chat, wikis, social networking and project management (among other things) in one elegant, in-browser communication client. With a release scheduled in late 2009, it is already being hailed by some as the ‘next generation’ of email.
Instead of sending an email with all the previous messages piled below, or keeping hold of them in your inbox, Google’s ‘waves’ contain a complete thread of multimedia messages located on a central server, allowing them to be shared between multiple users. Any participant can then reply anywhere in the message and edit the content – in fact, several users can edit a wave simultaneously. The service is live, allowing it not only to function as email and threaded conversation, but also instant messaging. If your friend is online, they receive your message instantly. If they’re not, they’ll get it in an email later.
Got an hour to spare? Then you can really get to know Google Wave
How do you use it?
The Google Wave inbox looks very similar to the current Gmail service, except it features the avatars (screen names and pictures) of your friends who are involved in each thread. There are also a number of indicators signifying if there is new content in that thread. This is a very important distinction from Gmail because it isn’t just about new messages – there can be any kind of new content in these waves.
Clicking on any of the wave threads will open a sidebar that shows the wave in its entirety. Let’s say one wave is a message from a friend and you want to reply to it. If they’re not currently online, you can do it below their message, just like you would in Gmail. Except there’s no new message window to open – you simply start typing below your friend’s message. Want to respond to particular part of their message? No problem… just starting typing directly below the part you want to reply to.
You can easily add other friends to the wave by dragging over their avatar from contacts… and this is where things really start to get interesting. If your friend has joined a little late and wants to know what’s been going on, he or she can use the Playback feature. This is kind of like rewinding the wave to watch it 
progress through its changes.
Email and instant messaging
Every participant in a wave can insert a reply or edit contributions directly. What’s 
more, this is instant rich-text editing so you’ll see what your fellow collaborators are typing in the wave instantly. This means that Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as ongoing threads – it allows for both collaboration and communication.
If this all sounds a bit public, you can easily send private messages too. In fact, if you send a private message within a multi-person wave then only the two of you will be able to see it, but it will still appear alongside everything else in the wave. That way, you can keep up with the public dialogue and contribute to the general thread whilst being able to share a private conversation on the side.
The key to it all is the faster line of communication. Attaching documents, like you do in email, is unnecessary in Google Wave – you can just drag and drop files into a wave and everybody has immediate access to them. Real-time conversations and collaboration make it an ideal tool for business teams as well… just imagine an entire office having Wave open to quickly share and receive files.
Google Wave may be hailed as the future of email and instant messaging, but it offers a lot more too. You can share photos with other users. You can link to RSS feeds. You can share and edit Google Maps, play online games, invite people to events, link to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and much more. Plus, everything you type goes through a ‘natural language’ spell checker that not only consults a dictionary for the right spelling but also intelligently checks the spelling against the context of what you’re typing. Oh, and it can also auto-translate what you’re typing as you type it.
Photos, wikis and Twits
Let’s go back to sharing photos for a minute. If you want to share some recent pictures 
with friends, you simply have to drag and drop them into the Wave window and other users will instantly be able to see thumbnails on their screen. Everybody in the wave can then collaborate to change the titles and descriptions of images, view slideshows and more.
Google Wave also allows users to create, edit and 
comment on all content, much like in a wiki. But unlike a wiki, the user-friendly interface and real-time edit updates ensure that when a few people are editing something they don’t step on each other’s toes. When somebody is working on content, you can see their name outlined in a brightly coloured box next to the edits they are making in real time. And, if you get confused, you can always use the Playback feature to go back and see which edits have been made.
And yes, Wave also works with Twitter. The team itself created a gadget for it, entitled ‘Twave’, that brings in tweets from your stream, complete with your contacts’ 
Twitter icons. You can respond to these tweets from within Wave and they will go back to your Twitter stream. But the best feature is Twave’s search feature which scans Twitter in real time and updates live when new results come in!
The wider waves
Google isn’t just thinking of Wave as another web application created to be used on a single site – they want it to be a communication platform that flourishes all over the web. The idea is to make the system as open for adoption as possible – Google wants to see waves created by one person communicating with waves created by another. They want them to be embedded into blog posts, social networking sites and even published independently elsewhere on the internet. To achieve this, Google plans to make Wave open source.
Google Wave will arrive in three phases. The first is Wave the product; created by Google and released as a web application in late 2009. The second is Wave the platform; where the system allows developers to get involved in and create new and exciting things for Google Wave. The third and final phase is Wave the protocol; its existence as a web communication platform that can be used across the internet.
This is a difficult product to get your head around – one you really have to see and interact with to fully understand its great potential. Unfortunately, unless you’re a developer, you’re not going to be able to see it for a while yet. In essence, Google Wave is a facilitator. It brings many of people’s favourite web communication tools together, allowing you to email, instant message, poke or Twit from one single platform. In short, Google Wave could be the revelation that changes the way we use the internet forever. Or it could be a damp squib. We’ll have to wait until later this year to find out.
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Tags: Blogger, Collaboration, Communication, Email, Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Wave, HTML 5, Instant messaging, MSN Messenger, online games, Open source, Photo sharing, Platform, Playback, Protocol, Real-time, RSS feeds, Social Networking, Twitter, Web chat, Wikipedia, Wikis
