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?
A wave is equal parts conversation, document, broadcast, and socket.
There. Done. Next.
Or… Let’s take another look at this.
- A conversation is two-way communication between one person and another, or a group of manageable size. The principle is that you take turns speaking and listening. This is how e-mail and instant messaging services operate. I create a message and send you a copy of that. You create a reply and send a copy to me. Rinse, repeat.
- A document is a mutable text that can be modified by whoever has access to it. The simplest form is a piece of paper on which I write a bit, then you write a bit, then me again.A digital document is more easily shared; I can e-mail you a copy, you modify it and send me a copy back. Even better are online document management systems like Google Docs or even, in a way, Wikipedia, where you don’t need to send each other copies because the most recent version is always online.
- A broadcast has one speaker and many listeners. Television operates on this principle, as do lectures and blog posts. The latter two commonly have a secondary component that allows responses to the original broadcast in the form of a Q&A round or a comments section under the blog posts. These comments and questions are initially responses to the original broadcast, and secondarily responses to one another.
- A socket is something you can plug stuff into that does other stuff. Electric sockets let you plug in lamps, coffee machines and personal entertainment devices. Browsers like Firefox and websites like Facebook allow third parties to create plug-ins that plug into them to do cool stuff in the browser/website which the original developers might never have thought of.
What does this mean concretely?
There. Doesn’t look too alien, does it? Looks like you’ve got an inbox right in the middle, an open message on the right and on the left there’s some folders and a contact list. Having used instant messengers and e-mail clients they’re all quite familiar to us. Whew!
What’s different from either e-mail or IM is that you’re not looking at a bunch of messages — or rather, copies of messages which were sent to you and which you sent, but rather, you’re seeing a list of message objects to which you have access.
Let’s say that again: when you see your e-mail inbox you’re looking at copies of messages that you’ve received or sent, but when you see your Wave inbox you’re looking at objects to which you have access.
You don’t send a wave as much as share it. Technical stuff like ‘federation’ aside, there’s only really one copy of any particular wave on a server somewhere. When you reply, you’re modifying that one single wave object. Everyone else who’s on that wave then sees it as ‘unread’ because it’s changed since the last time they looked at it.
This is kind of a big deal. While it looks like e-mail and smells like IM, the fact that each message is a shared object makes it a lot more like a blog post, where there’s only one post on a server somewhere, and any comments are simply added to it, rather than copies being sent to all the participants.
See why a wave is also a document? The shared nature allows for a great deal of interaction. Not just a reply where you assume the recipient remembers the last message he sent, or where you copy-paste chunks of the last thing you received. You can insert your reply at any point in the message on a per-paragraph basis so you can hit on the key points.
More radically (and more like a document) you can also edit the original message — or, I should say, object. This can be as innocuous as correcting your mother’s spelling to something as brilliantly useful as signing your name to a friend’s suggestion to go see movie X or Y.
Think about that. Instead of twenty people replying their preference, changing their minds, or failing to reply everyone can just open edit wave and add their name to the list of people who want to go see X, or the list for Y.
Next up: Broadcasts and sockets, or why Google Wave may be the future of the web (or not)
