Will You Ride Google's Wave?

Saturday, May 30, 2009: Google is trying to do something new and bold again. The company has unveiled one of its most ambitious projects -- Wave. Wave is a very bold way to re-write the manner in which people communicate and interact online. It is nothing conventional you can think of. Google merges your e-mails, IMs, Twits, Facebook and a lot of other such services and offer them under one roof called Wave.
You can understand Wave as a content that you have created. Let's assume this news item. Now, you can share this news with people, and your friends may keep adding content to it. They may write some more, add some pics, comment through twits and much more. According to Google Blog, "A 'wave' is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more."

But, Wave is a new concept. Google needs to put in a lot of efforts to educate people about its usage. And it seems Google has started that 'education' thing already. The recent developers' meet was focussed around that only.

The flip side is Google is known to roll out a lot of new services, but only a few are successful. Most of the successful products are the ones which it acquired. How many of you use Knol? When was the last time you logged into it? Knol was once one of the most ambitious projects at Google.

But one thing is clear with the timing of the Wave announcement by Google. It has killed the hype that its rival Microsoft was trying to create with its new search engine Bing. Now, what is Bing? It's nothing but the third attempt of the doomed Vista creator to revive its search engine -- first it was MSN Search, then it became Live Search and now it's Bing. What would be the next -- ping pong?

Here's how it works:
In Google Wave, you create a Wave and add people to it. Everyone on your Wave can use formatted text, photos, gadgets and even feeds from other sources on the Web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your Wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use 'playback' to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the 'live' concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, Google says it intends to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Also, if you're a developer and you'd like to roll up your sleeves, you can start working on Google Wave with the company. Google has not yet decided the specific time frame for public release, but plans to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview.

One of the dangers of Wave is, Google is integrating too many services in it which may lead to vendor lock-in and curb competition. This may make Google the Microsoft of the online world.