Taking a look over the past decade or so of technology and communications you’ll notice that they’re hasn’t been any revolutionary ideas that have come forward. Sure there have been a lot of improvements or augmentations to current technology but no one has really gone back and thought about the underlying principals of communication and how to make them transcend new mediums. When I first heard about Google Wave it was something that was supposed to be “pretty cool” but I didn’t hear much more of it then that. Queue the following video, which I thoroughly recommend watching if you have the time (I’ll give a general overview of it anyway if you can’t spare the 1.5 hours):
In essence Wave is a wrapper around many different modes of communication such as email, twitter and instant messaging with augmentations that allow for some creative ways of interacting with the flow of the communications. This by itself isn’t a revolutionary means of transforming communication but due to Google’s idea of open sourcing the majority of the code and having a wealth of APIs developed this will allow the market to drive the innovation, and that is where the true revolution can begin.
Looking over it I couldn’t help but notice a trend that has been developing over the past few years when it comes to technologies like this. On the Internet we have access to such wide and disperate sources of information that it is easy to become overwhelmed when you’re trying to filter out everything you don’t want to see. Many technologies have tried to solve this issue by allowing you to aggregate your personal choices into one interface (things like RSS feeds) in the hopes to focus your experience. Wave is Google’s attempt to transcend all the mediums and bring them onto a more robust and open platform which is not only a boon for them but also for standards based development, something that the Internet has been lacking for a long time (thank you Internet Explorer!).
I like the idea a lot. I see myself using many different forms of communication these days and it would be great to have a unified web based interface to the lot of them. Of course the augmentations that Google has added (that spell checker and auto-translator are awesome) would make using this platform worthwhile but as we’ve seen with other Google products once the developers get their hands on it the applications will widen considerably. Couple that with the fact that they’ll let you run your own Wave server and I’m sold, I love having new toys to play with on my web server 🙂
Hopefully the haiku and ASCII frog I sent them will butter them up enough to send me an invite….. 😉
