Saturday 30 May 2009

The Wave is coming ...

Google Wave that is ;-)

http://wave.google.com/

Here's a direct link to the Tech Preview video :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
(Skip forward to 7:30 if you prefer to leave out some of the marketing and introduction at the start)

The video is an hour and 20 minute demo on a product that Google has been working on for the last 2 years or so. It is a view on how the way we communicate using computers is likely to change in the very near future.

Seeing this, I am really beginning to believe some of the hype about Google becoming a true Microsoft killer. This doesn't even take into account all the hard work Google is doing to supplant Microsoft's products through software vendors with their own paid for products (an issue for another blog post). With technology like Wave, Google totally outclasses pretty much anything anyone else is doing right now.

Interestingly, Google is putting the protocol behind Wave forward as an open standard so other software vendors can build their own interoperable (and possibly competing) systems and products with it :-

http://www.waveprotocol.org/

This is all very altruistic but it does beg the question, "how do they make any money out of this"? I guess we'll be finding out in the months ahead.

Maybe it's just paranoid old me but aspects of Wave are also a little scary. It opens up a whole Pandora's box of new possible security and privacy issues (much as any new technology does). Some of those bots look real friendly in a demo setting (Spelly, Buggy, Tweety etc) but ones could also be built for less savoury purposes in the wrong hands.

On the whole though this is really cool technology and opens up some very interesting possibilities for new and better ways of working (in real time) collaboratively in the future.

Nice work Lars and team!

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