Google Wave: Socket to me baby

The Rasmussen Brothers, who sound like a zing-​​hip edge-​​jazz outfit that only really cool people have heard about, understand something that few technology inventors focus on too much: they have no control over the future. Most innovators like to own their invention and would love to be the King of the Thing that becomes hugely popular. This isn’t a dig against the Zuckerbergs and Andersons of the world, but there’s a lot to be said for the Buytaerts (home town boy made good!) and Mullenwegs who embrace the unknowable and actively encourage others to play in their software sandbox.

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.

But the future is unpredictable. In the ‘50s kids thought that today we’d all be wearing silver body-​​suits and zip around on hover-​​scooters and snort astronaut food from a syringe. Instead, we have cell phones, carsharing and the battle against bootlegging.

Google, therefore, has considered that if Wave is to be the new e-​​mail it must be blissfully agnostic, without specific boundaries on the type of content that can be shared, while affording any new innovation all the wondrous boons of the real-​​time and/​or asynchronous communication technology that has been developed for Wave — and to allow waves to be used freely as content items for purposes other than merely the most obvious.

Remember that I said a wave is a shared object, like a web page? That object is an XML file, an interoperable and flexible exchange 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 complicated 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?

You will outfit your Wave account, for free, 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 a new post, namely the wave you just wrote, for everyone to read.

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 suddenly spelled correctly instead of being the innocent impetus for an endless avalanche of lawsuits for racial slander.

But wait, it gets cooler.

That Wave is sitting pretty in your Sent box, nary 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, coming from your Twitter account, but on your screen it’s like the timeline is just one long wave with lots of little 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 gadgets and robots. Gadgets 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.

There’s a subtle paradigm shift at play, namely the unification of a variety of communication methods, current and future. It’s hard to correctly grasp the significance of this shift, but think of it like this: how often do you get a message about content?

All the time. You get a text message to tell you you have voicemail. You get an e-​​mail to tell you there’s a comment on your blog, or that you’ve been mentioned on Twitter. And isn’t that just plain retarded? LiveJournal does you a favor by including the full text of the comment you received in their notification e-​​mail and offering you a reply form in the e-​​mail itself, but that form doesn’t always work. With most such notifications, in order to read the content they’re alerting you to, let alone interact with that content, you have to click a handy link that takes you from your mail environment to whatever website the content resides on.

With Wave, it doesn’t have to be so. The message is th content. The wave is the blog, the reply is the comment. That’s AWESOME.

I have three more things in store for you very shortly, and then a followup down the road after the Goole Wave Beta goes live.

First, coming up next, is a quick overview of the cool technologies that already exist that show how Wave can replace e-​​mail and be better, how it can replace IM and be better, how it can replace on-​​line document collaboration and be…

Second, thereafter, is a walkthrough of a typical day in the life of a future Wave user, based both on what Wave can do currently as well as what it can do when it’s finished — and, for the hell of it, what could conceivably be made for it.

Third, and finally for now, I set aside my delicious drink of Kool-​​Aid and look at the current reality, warts and all. What impresses and what disappoints, what works and what doesn’t.

Stay tuned!