Foreseeing a new era of real-time Web-based communication and collaboration, Google Inc. (GOOG) today previewed its new “Wave” platform to developers at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Developed by the pair of brothers behind Google’s phenomenally successful Maps technology, Wave is essentially a Web application that creates a shared online desktop where users can exchange real-time messages, share and edit text documents, images, and graphics, incorporate online Widgets, and keep track of ongoing projects and conversations. The technology is being released to developers immediately and will be open to the public later this year.  | | Not your father's e-mail. |
“Two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, e-mail and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — e-mail mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls,” wrote Lars Rasmussen, who along with his brother Jens founded Where 2 Tech and later sold the mapping startup to Google, in his blog entry announcing the new offering. “Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved.” Wave, added Rasmussen, is designed to be “a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point.” While Google online applications, such as Docs and Gmail, have proven popular with a significant fraction of users, the company has spectated as social network sites like Facebook, and newfangled communications media like Twitter, have arisen to facilitate new types of interaction online. The company has been rumored in the last several months to be pondering an acquisition of, for example, Twitter. Wave appears to be, for now, Google’s answer to the rapidly converging messaging and social networking trends that are reshaping the way users interact and collaborate. Wave could be particularly powerful as a platform that unites various forms of real-time and persistent communications with many of the rich interactive features of social networking sites in a single place, allowing for both business and personal relationships that need not be scattered across different sites and different media. “Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — e-mail versus chat, or conversations versus documents?” asked Rasmussen. “Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the Web [sic] today, in one smooth continuum?” To that end, Google is open-sourcing the protocol underlying Wave and said it hopes that independent developers will undertake the tasks of building out the application, adding it to existing Web services, and linking it with social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on. As with most Google applications, Wave is expected to be free to users. While Google did not address the issue of generating revenue from the application at the conference today, it’s likely to be ad-supported and to be available in “premium” form to enterprises, for a fee, who want more customization and functionality.
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