Let Me Explain Google Wave

Author's note: It's possible that you know all of this. I am writing this down in the hopes that people who didn't get it before might be enlightened by my thought process. Enjoy.

I sought out a Google Wave invitation, not exactly knowing what I was getting into. It was new and I wanted to add it to the list of new technologies I could claim myself as an early adopter of (the list, as I recall it, runs from mini disc to kindle--incidentally, neither lasted very long).

My invitation came on Friday night. I poked it a few times over the weekend, but it ran too slow and there was too much going on at once. I was a member of the Twin Cities Wave and pretty much no other waves. I was confused and I was bored.

(A wave is a message thread made up of individual messages called pings.)

Yesterday I was confused and bored again. But then I joined a few smaller waves with some friends.

Google Wave is the following existing technologies wrapped into one delicious web app burrito:

• Wiki - Anyone can edit any part of a wave and there is a full record of who has done what. This beats wikipedia (or any other wiki I've used) by about a thousand in terms of intuitiveness.
• Message board - A ping (a message within a wave) can be replied to much like a LiveJournal or I Can Has Cheeseburger-style post, with root replies and sub-replies.
• Instant message client - Wave lets you see who is online. It is actually most like the old ICQ, where you can see what another person is typing as they type it. If you open up a wave with one other person--bam. Instant message.
  
• Email - It's not exactly like email, but it really helps to think of it as email: every message is private and includes only the recipients you choose. You can send a wave to a person when they're offline and it will sit in their inbox until they return.
  

These technologies are all a decade old or older. But just because Google Wave hasn't really introduced any new technologies from an end-user standpoint doesn't mean the combination of existing technologies isn't potentially game shifting (but not really game changing, like email was).

It may be obvious how there is some overlap with the functions the items on this list fulfill. But what was not immediately obvious to me is why it's so interesting to slip them all together into one very browser-crashing web application. Here's what I can see so far.

What it will be good for:

• Collaboration - What I never could get wikis to do, Wave does almost effortlessly: one document with multiple editors. Google suggests you use Wave to have everyone at a meeting take notes; maybe smart, maybe dumb. The playback feature is key here--it totally trumps the edit history page on Wikipedia. Much more useful (to me) to see edits progress temporally than see them listed.
  
• Discussion - The problem with message boards is their public nature. The problem with email and Gmail is its linear nature. Wave lets you communicate privately in a message board setting. If you branch off into two topics, no more guessing what a person is replying to--you can create new waves based on old waves. Google Wave provides the sharpest, slickest format for private, lengthy online discussion so far.
  

Wave is important. Being better than a wiki and easier to use for lengthy conversations than email will allow us to have richer conversations more easily. Definite value added. Not a Segway.

There is one problem I can see: the necessity of ubiquity. Sort of like Twitter, there's a critical mass that must be reached before this will be useful to me. I can't collaborate by myself. But give it a year; this thing will be pretty popular but, as I said, I don't think it will change the game on the scale of email.