Google Wave

So, I am really excited about google wave. I’ve watched the keynote, read the specs, and the mail­ing list. Google seems to be legit­i­mately plan­ning to open this up as much as pos­si­ble. Eas­ily as much as email is open now, plus they are giv­ing a lot of ref­er­ence imple­men­ta­tions and exam­ple code that even goes beyond that in my opinion.

The reac­tion so far has been very pos­i­tive I think, but there has been some neg­a­tiv­ity. Most of it seems to be along the lines of, “that’s noth­ing new”, or “it’s just fancy chat” etc. I think a lot of this is miss­ing the point from a per­spec­tive of tech­no­log­i­cal supe­ri­or­ity. Sure, it might not be any­thing that dif­fer­ent if you are the kind of per­son who can set up a wiki, and a mail­ing list in a few min­utes. Most peo­ple aren’t like that. Most peo­ple have never used a mail­ing list. Most peo­ple that use com­put­ers have never used a mail­ing list, or a wiki. It’s just too hard, and not some­thing they are inter­ested in. Peo­ple that for­get this I think, may just be (envi­ably) iso­lated from that level of user.

The inbox metaphor is some­thing that peo­ple get. If I can send you a wave, that is also a wiki page, and a chat, and a shared doc­u­ment all in one that is a lot of hur­dles I have crossed in get­ting you to use mod­ern soft­ware. Cur­rently I have to talk you into a wiki, train you to use email cor­rectly. (no reply below what i said!) and con­vince you that chat isn’t just for your kids.

From what I have seen the ini­tial user inter­face will be easy enough for every­one to just get, with­out hav­ing to be talked into it. That ease of use is based on the email metaphor. The actual pro­to­col though is not sim­i­lar to the email metaphor at all, and is another source of excitement.

This sys­tem is light­weight and sim­ple enough for it to very eas­ily grow into things that are not planned now. The sys­tem of waves, wavelets, and blips, allows for a really sim­ple access con­trol sys­tem, and ver­sion­ing. As more clients and tools sup­port this I think we will really start see­ing some uses for the tech crowd that look very lit­tle like email.

I hope use of this spreads quickly. Microsoft seems like the big loser here. Of course they could imple­ment this in what­ever is after Exchange 2010, but some­how I think they would resist out of pride.