Note: Google Wave is currently in Developer Preview, meaning it's not yet even beta, and only has a few thousand users. The current user experience is not representative of the stated vision, so for the sake of clarity I've taken some liberties in this part by including functions which currently have not yet been implemented or don't reliably work, and assume a larger userbase than is currently the case.
As a New Media fag I'm all about doing more things faster, and the Rasmussens and their team clearly love me a great deal. While Wave is an open protocol and platform, and anyone will be able to build their own Wave server with their own interface, Google's Wave interface is fast.
Not necessarily in terms of performance, just yet (it's still developer preview and it's some wicked new tech) but rather in terms of user experience. They've taken away a lot of bulky conventions we've grown accustomed to, such as the difference in the experience of reading an e-mail and composing one and the traditional agreement between computer and user that I shall not save your work unless you command me to.
Time for a change, and for the better, says I.
The Rasmussens clearly thought about the commonalities between the most popular forms of communication over the last century, and the most promising emerging ones. As Vladimir Propp did for the fairy tale, they defined a taxonomy of characteristics that circumscribe how humans interact with each other, and how we'd actually like to interact now that new technologies are available to free us from the bondage of time and space.
Okay, so the title is a bit hyperbolic. It's not entirely unfair, though. As I'll show in this post, Wave has the potential to bring almost everything you do on the web together in one slick, harmonious, easy-to-manage system. Impossible? Hardly. Impressive? Certainly. Pipe dream? Hmm...
Remember that I said a wave is a shared object? That object is an XML file, an interoperable standard that does All Sorts of Neat Stuff, from RSS feeds to those Office 2007 files your colleagues from Head Office send you which you still can't bloody open. With a little bit of wizardry that isn't nearly as complicate as you might imagine, it's possible to embed a wave in a web page.
Before I go into how this works and why it's awesome, just go with it, okay?
Your Wave account is outfitted with that Little Bit of Wizardry, which is a magical amulet that connects your mind to the All-River, and connects your Wave account with your blog. You fire up a new wave. You whisper the incantation to your magical amulet. The power of the All-River flows through your veins and... your blog has just been updated with the wave you just wrote.
You notice a typo. Without thinking, you hit backspace and correct it. Do you need to click anything? Confirm? Re-publish? No. It's done. That wave is now a post on your blog, and if I were reading it I'd have noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the word 'niggardly' is now spelled correctly instead of being the innocent impetus for an endless avalanche of accusations of racism.
But wait, it gets cooler.
That Wave is sitting pretty in your Sent box, without a care in the world, then suddenly pops back into your inbox to let you know that there's been a comment to your blog post. In fact, the comment someone posted is right there, at the bottom of the wave. Is there a handy link to take you to your blog so you can reply to that comment? Nuh uh. You reply right then and there.
By embedding a wave it becomes a broadcast, just like a blog post, but it's still a wave. That's what I mean when I say that this brilliant bit of insight and engineering smoothly allows you to transition between different modes of communication. You're in your wave account, writing and replying just like you would e-mail. I'm on your blog, reading your posts and replying just as I would with any other webpage.
Since Wave is also a socket you can plug stuff into it. Third-party extensions are being written by the droves, to let you embed your waves in your WordPress or Drupal blog, but also to read your Twitter timeline. That one's really cool; you drop that little plug-in into a new wave, sign in with Twitter's credentials and you see all the most recent tweets.
And you can reply to them.
The recipient will see a reply to their tweet, but on your screen, it's like the timeline is just one long wave with lots of messages you can reply to. The twitter plug-in serves as an ambassador between your wave account and your twitter account, translating back and forth without you having to worry about a thing.
The plug-ins come in two flavors, namely extensions and robots. Extensions are a lot like Facebook apps or Firefox plug-ins and let you embed other stuff in your waves, anything from a Google Map to a game of chess to, down the road, a Skype webcam chat. Robots are 'virtual participants' in the wave and scramble diligently in the background to do anything from fixing your racist typos to translating your wave to a blog or twitter post to translating your every written word into Hebrew. The sky's the limit.
Explaining Wave is a difficult thing. Going by bullet-points, knee-jerk reactions include understimation, confusion and dismissal. I tell you plainly, therefore, that Wave is the shit and to keep that in mind as you read this. I promise, pinky swear, that there will be honest critical evaluation later. For now, just go with it, 'kay?
I will now explain to you, in one sentence and four pictures, what Wave is. Ready?
The brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who built Google Maps, set themselves this question: "What would e-mail look like if it were invented today?" It's a worthy question. E-mail, as a standard, is now four decades old. Instant Messaging likewise, having been born as Unix Talk in the '70s. Since then we've encountered a multitude of problems and opportunities the creators could never have dreamed of: spam, push, mobile intertubes.
Some say people are getting dumber; I say that communication is becoming more egalitarian, that the dumb are simply more visible to each other and to us (who are not dumb, naturally). There's a justifiable horror in response to l33t-speak, txt lnguaj, personal profile pages that are an abomination to the eyes and ears and sanity, but it's not such a big deal. People are communicating more and more, filling every moment of their day with interaction with other people and even though a tweet is no substitute for Face Time, all of them are to be celebrated. Nobody ever really got dumber from talking to somebody else, so let's cheer for the adorable idiots who flood the 'net with OMGs because they're learning and becoming more awesome, bit by bit and byte bi byte.
