Henry Ford once said: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” Sage wisdom, that. I’m a sucker for Apple products because they consistently give me the little thrill of experiencing that someone, be it an architect, engineer or godly designer, gave great thought to making this feature or that function not merely a faster horse, but to re-invent it as a space buggy.
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.
As I said at the end of part 1, the key is that Wave was designed for the smooth transitioning of one mode of dialogue to another. Live to time-delayed, private to group conversation, all in the same space, in the same manner. Further, as a platform, Wave permits the evolution and inclusion of new media through a third-party plugin architecture.
And one further crucial thing to understand is that Wave is open. This is possibly the biggest difference between Wave and flavour-of-the-month social networks and services; Google doesn’t want to own it. Or, well, they probably want to, but they’re deliberately creating a level playing field where they could, in principle, be competed into oblivion.
Much of Wave’s code is already open-source, more will follow. The idea is that anyone could build a Wave server that could securely and reliably interoperate with all other Wave servers. Just as anyone can build their own e-mail server today. Does a Gmail user notice anything different when he e-mails a Windows Live user instead of a fellow Gmailer? Not a sausage, and that will apply to Wave as well.
Next up, I’ll list the many wondrous features, functions and technologies and the overarching vision that makes Wave such a fascinating and revolutionary prospect. If you really can’t wait, however, take a peek at the Cliff notes of the presentation Lars and his team made at the Google I/O developer’s conference in May.
