Faster, stronger, better, more.
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.
Google Wave has this nifty feature called playback. Just as Wikipedia articles preserve a history of previous versions you can browse, all changes to a Wave are recorded for posterity. Every added photo, every reply, edit, correction, deletion, everything. This allows you to step through a wave’s evolution and quickly get the gist of the ebb and flow of conversation, or quickly scrub back and forth using the nifty timeline slider.
That’s a cool feature in and of itself. Hours of fun. What makes it a big deal, however, is that it gives the user a tremendous sense of security. Once I’ve typed something in a wave, I know it’s safe. The power could fail, the browser could crash, or I could just walk away without saving, but it’d still be in my Wave account exactly as I left it, for me to edit and improve before sending.
There’s no separate subject line, no to: or cc: fields. You start a new wave, you just get an empty panel. Start typing. Your first sentence is automatically put in bold; that’s your subject right there. Hit return and continue on with your message. Every keystroke is logged, at any time you can be interrupted and when you open your Wave account back up again, there’s your draft just as you left it.
Finished composing your message? Drag in some contacts. You can do that from the IM-style buddylist on the side or click a button for a handy popup where you can filter your contacts list and select the one(s) you want to add.
Then you click send.
Right?
Wait, no, just kidding you don’t click send. You don’t click anything. When you added those contacts to the wave it immediately showed up in their inbox. Scary? Hardly. If you made a mistake you can just remove that contact [doesn’t yet work in current developer preview] and they’ll never know they received an errant wave.
This makes Wave wicked fast. You never confirm an action because that’s implicit in performing it. If you type something you want to send, it’s sent. Your computer, suddenly, trusts you to know what you’re doing and you don’t have to feel any additional pressure, because you know that everything is infinitely undoable and fixable so you can just get on with your life.
Because messages are sent and received near-instantaneously, and Wave is endowed with very sensible and intuitive shortcut keys, a Wave can be used as an IM conversation. Someone sends you a Wave, right? You open it up, see the icon of the person who sent it, and the little green dot that indicates they’re online right now. You reply, calling them a naughty name. They reply back instantly telling you something unkind about your mother. You know, banter. You and your friend have that kind of relationship.
As you’re chatting, your messages are transmitted letter by letter. Now, this can be turned off if you prefer, and experience alone will show how people respond to this ability, but there’s a lot to be said for it. When you speak to someone you don’t have the ability to correct your sentences before uttering them, and even if we sometimes stammer a little, we don’t let that get in the way of a good conversation.
This nifty real-time information transmission is a fundamental Wave feature that applies to basically anything you could do in a wave, not just text. The Google Maps plug-in demonstrates that. If you and I are chatting in a Wave and I want to show you my house, I drag that plug-in into our wave. We both see a Google Maps window in the wave itself, and as I click and drag around it, you see your map moving around, zooming in, until I drop a pin on my house. You take over, zoom in further, remove the pin, and I see it happening. I notice you’re zooming in on the back yard. I remember I was having one of my special invitation-only parties on the day the satellite passed over, and I quickly delete the Maps plug-in from the Wave before you can squint at the wobbly shapes long enough to discern my curious back yard proclivities.
Of course, I’m still not safe, because you can use the playback feature to see how we moved around the map. I guess I’m pretty screwed. No more parties for me.
All the troublesome stuff like conflict resolution (what if we’re both clicking and dragging around the map?) is taken care of by Wave’s technology, so the developer of a plug-in like this Maps example only needs to focus on how his plug-in works, what information it sends and receives, and trust the Wave protocol to take care of the rest.
What you wind up with is a platform that can transmit data fast enough for live interaction, store meticulously granular history, allow multiple parties to interact simultaneously, and all this within a browser. That’s a strong, strong platform.
So what would it be like to actually use it for a day?
Coming up next…
