Chapter 1: What is Wave?

Printer-friendly version

Despite the millions of words written about Wave, there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly Wave is. When it was first launched, people tried to wedge it into the Social Media arena, claiming that it was going to be Googles challenger to Twitter and Facebook. However they soon discovered that it really wasn't suited to that role.

As people searched for a nice and neat definition for Wave, they kept forgetting the one that had been put forward at the IO Conference:

“Wave is email if it had been designed in the 21st Century”

It's that. No more, no less.

Of course, for many people the reaction to that statement is pretty much “meh”. Email is boring, we all know the problems with email, it's unreliable, it's hard to keep track of long conversations and much much more. Anything that wants to compare itself to email must be equally boring and “meh”. For such a simple statement it does hold a lot of meaning in it.

However Wave isn't simply a rehash of old ideas on improving email. Rather it draws on lessons learnt through the development of a wide range of collaborative technologies, from Instant Messaging to wikis to source control systems. From this parentage Wave offers the following:

• Versioned conversations: Each change or update to a Wave conversation creates a new version of that conversation. This means that you can do wonderful things like roll back a conversation to see who made what changes and when.

• Federation: Multiple participants from multiple Wave sources are able to take part in a single wave. For instance, someone in company A starts a wave, adds someone from company B and they communicate. Later in the conversation they realise that they will need input from so and so in company C.

• Agents: Agents are addon pieces of software that assist both the Wave server and participants. This allows for extensions that will allow Wave to interact with both existing systems and any future developments.

What is the Independant Wave

When Google announced Wave, they first launched the Sandbox to allow developers to get their toes wet, then they launched the Preview to allow the wider community to have a look around.

However for many people the realisation soon dawned that while Wave was cool and shiny, for a number of reasons they couldn't take advantage of it.

Leaving aside the closed nature of the Preview (it was launched as an “invite only” service), one of the biggest problems for businesses who were interested in utilising Wave was control of the data. They could not or would not use a service that put the day to day control of the data contained within their waves out of their control. This, combined with a number of other factors led to the rise in demand for the Independent Wave.

To my mind, the Independent Wave is in many ways more important to the survival of the Wave idea than Googles own Wave service. By building a Wave eco-system in the wild, development of the software and ideas behind Wave will happen a lot faster. Nothing provokes evolution more than real life challenges.