Google is previewing a new web application to developers that may eventually supplant Gmail. Google Wave goes beyond the basic capabilities of email in order to let people communicate and work collaboratively in real-time with text, photos, videos, maps, gadgets, and social networking feeds from other sources on the internet.
A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document. A user starts off by creating a wave and adding people to it. Everyone on a wave can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It is being billed as concurrent, collaborative rich text editing, where you can see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is well suited for quick messages as well as for persistent content. A "playback" function is also available to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
The project is being headed up by Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen, who joined Google with his brother Jens after their tiny mapping startup named "Where 2 Tech" was bought by Google. Technologies from that company eventually became a part of Google Maps.
"Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. You see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave," stated Rasmussen in a blog post.
The code for Google Wave will be open source, with developers given freedom to modify it as they wish. Google Wave can be thought of as being comprised of three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol.
The Google Wave product is now available as a developer preview, and is the web application portion that people will use to access and edit waves. It is a HTML 5 application built on Google's Web Toolkit, and includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop, which will enable users to drag a set of photos into a wave.
Google Wave can also be considered as a platform. It is being developed with a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will allow developers to build new extensions that work inside waves. Developers will also be able to embed waves in other web services.
The underlying format is the Google Wave protocol, used as the means of sharing and storing waves. It includes the live concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services.
"Developers are going to see the potential of Google Wave as a platform; we hope they'll leap on it," said Wave engineer Adam Schuck. "They'll be able to integrate it with existing systems they use today, or produce new tools that allow people to improve and manage their communications."
The ideas behind Google Wave came from a project by Jens Rasmussen codenamed "Walkabout". His basic idea was that the two most successful forms of digital communication were originally designed in the 1960's to imitate analog formats. Email was designed to mimicked snail mail, and instant messaging mimicked phone calls. However, many different forms of communication had been invented since then, such as blogs, wikis, and real-time collaborative documents. Walkabout was proposed as a new communications model that used all these advances as a starting point. Greater capacity on the internet and fast internet connections make this new paradigm possible, along with computers that have lots of memory and capable of playing several concurrent video streams.
Google Wave's prototyping started with a five-person team in Google's offices in Sydney. An expanded team has been working on bringing about a public release for the last two years.
No launch date for a public product has been set. "We're inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch," wrote Rasmussen.