Google Wave

Après Wave, le déluge

What’s the fuss?

Last week I watched the technical demonstration of Google’s soon to be launched service Google Wave. The web often feels awash with ‘me too’ services and get rich schemes clamouring for our attention, so it’s rare and refreshing to come across one that genuinely feels groundbreaking. It seems like Google has nothing less in its sights than the replacement of the ubiquitous SMTP email.

So what is it? In a nutshell, Wave is an open source, server based application that seeks to deliver much of the functionality of email, Instant Messenger, collaborative document management and creation with a set of well defined interfaces.

So why all the excitement on my part? At first glance, it looks like another one of those social networking/Instant Messaging/blog type things. However, there are a number of features unique to Wave that piqued my interest. Still, I get ahead of myself, I have put a link to the 90 minute demonstration below:

To see the 90 minute demonstration you can access the link here http://tinyurl.com/nal2az

How might it be used?

We can expect a user of Wave to write a document and send it to one or more collaborators using the Wave interface. This document might be: a short communication like an email; an article for review; or a legal contract to be reviewed. It’s clear that Google would like us to refer to this document as a Wave.

Colleagues can then optionally edit the documents in-line (insert comments at a particular point in the document), at the end of the document or edit the base document itself. The clever piece here is that multiple reviewers can edit the Wave at the same time, and in a nod to the 1976 Unix System V tool “talk“, there is no waiting for one user to finish typing before you see the results, indeed the demonstration shows multiple editing streams all happening at the same time.

The ability to playback the construction of a Wave showing each edit and how it has changed makes the more traditional “track changes” seem very last century.

What else is special?

So far whilst this is nice, it’s not astonishing. It was the little things that grabbed my attention. The demonstration includes a piece where the sentence ‘Ickland is an Ickland’ is typed into Google Wave and it automatically  changes it into ‘Iceland is an Island’. It understood the context of the words, and corrected them accordingly. This is variously known as semantic processing or natural language processing, and has been promised for a very long time, however, like our friend the Microsoft Paperclip such agents mostly irritated rather than assisted users. It remains to be seen if this feature will deliver but if anyone can do this Google can. I assume that Google’s spiders are accessing every on-line word, allowing a rich statistical map to be formed from which a semantic language model is maintained. This is potentially the first example of generic mass market artificial Intelligence I’ve seen.

Google appear committed to removing all barriers to Wave becoming ubiquitous; as well as a hosted Internet delivered service (like Google Mail or Hotmail), the Wave code base will be made available under some form of Open Source licence. This will allow companies to configure and run their own internal Wave servers, as well as allowing 3rd party vendors to integrate Wave functionality within their own product (although it’s not yet clear what the licensing model will be, which may affect its integration within Commercial products).

Why is it important?

The stated aim from the developers is to produce a native internet application that replaces many of the current analogues: email replacing mail; Instant Messaging replacing quick phone chats; and document editing replacing double space copy. Google have recognised that these applications result in a document, and have created a rich and deep architecture that allows and encourages a range of methods to create and edit these documents. Furthermore, the ability to host your wave server will allow adoption by organisations not yet ready to store their data in someone else’s ‘cloud’

What might it do for education systems?

Having documents at the centre of wave that can develop as a learner or group of learner’s understanding of a subject matures is enormously powerful. It provides a reflective mechanism that acknowledges contribution, and one can see how this,(together with the ability to insert other digital media) can capture both the synthesis of an idea and the evidence that supports the idea. The ability to track group criticism could form the basis of a strong pedagogy.

Open API’s and intelligent agents will provide interfaces that will allow formative assessment to be embedded and recorded. Donald Clarke in his blog post learning waves suggests that learning Waves are an obvious extension. It’s clear to me that much of the promise in this technology is its ability to support and capture a wide range of dialogue that will not only allow the capture of concepts and ideas but also actively encourage criticism and contribution, two ideas that underpin many academic disciplines.

Is it likely to live up to this hype?

Well the simple answer is we don’t know. It might go the way of Google Rooms aka Google Lively that was withdrawn within a year. However, I don’t think so, while it may take time to gain critical mass, the capability presented in the demonstration has so much potential and fuses together so many tools, I suspect that this technology will be incorporated into a whole range of new applications. Google Earth/Maps had quite a slow start but has increasingly replaced many geo-coding systems and is used within many business sites. This application comes from the same team and, in the opinion of this author, has the potential to replace both email and Instant Messaging, two of the largest and most productive applications on the Internet.