Google Wave - plenty to think about in this 90 minute overview

Updated 4 June 2009

I'm not that easily impressed by new ways of using the Web - because I think there is no shortage of useful tools: instead there is a shortage of useful tools put to good use.

If you've got 90 minutes to spare, and can tolerate the self-congratulatory tone, which measured about 5 on the Wolfram scale, the presentation below explains Google Wave, a very sophisticated "rendered-in-your-browser" but "running-in-the-cloud" collaboration environment, which Google says it will launch later in 2009, and which makes Google Docs (and a lot of other collaboration products, VLEs, e-portfolios, social networking environments) look extremely primitive. 

Just as you can install third party applications in an iPhone or G1 phone, you will be able to place third party tools ("widgets" or "robots") within the Wave collaboration environment, and Google's intention is to encourage the widespread development of these. (Examples include a simultaneous translation robot, which translates typed text in real time between any of 40 language pairs, and a "semantic" spell checker that knows the difference between "bean" and "been", depending on context.)

Major questions for organisational users of this kind of service - partly solved by the fact that Google intends to release the "lions share" of the source code for the Wave Server so that organisations will be able to run their own - will have to be: who is hosting the data, under what terms, and with what security? what if they go bust, or stop offering the service? 

Plenty to think about.

See also Michael Feldstein's  What intrigues me about Wave.

Comments

[Dick Moore]

Interesting that Wave can also run on your server (as you say, they are releasing the software) and so can run locally and interoperate with the other Wave platforms in the cloud.

The natural language spell checker looks simple but is astonishingly difficult to implement. This must be a fruitful spin-off from Google having access to the very large body of texts that sit behind many of Google's applications; their spell checker is already very smart, whilst their auto translation services are the best I have seen.

We can expect the educational community to take to Wave very quickly and to incorporate its use into many learning programs. (I have already seen the
term learning wave used.)

So the tone of the presentation is self-congratulatory, yes, but I believe the developers have got something important to congratulate themselves about.

Dick