I’ve been granted access to Google Wave for a bit less than a day now, and from my limited time with it I can say the following:

• It feels much more like an application than a web page. This is contrary to most other ‘apps’ by Google, including Google Docs, Maps, GMail, Reader etc. where I’ve always felt like trapped in a glorified web page. This is, most certainly, in part due to the use of GWT and the more refined design in Wave (compared to the stark, simplistic design found in other Google apps/pages.
• Nevertheless, parts of it are relatively slow. This could very easily be attributed (to a large extent) to my connection — I’m in London for a few days and the connection here is much slower than the one back home. It’s still fun to use though, just not as snappy as I’d like it to be. Clearly this is still ‘work in progress’.
• It’s clearer than it ever was that from a usability standpoint it needs to improve. It’s already very good, but there’s definitely room for improvement. Some people have voiced concerns (in a Google Wave no less) regarding its ease of use — I had no problems whatsoever, and I find the design much better than most Google ‘apps’, but then again I probably wouldn’t have any problems anyway. It’ll be interesting to see other people/companies providing better interfaces for Wave in the future; think Apple Wave, 80% of the usability with 10% of the clutter =)
• I’m also very curious to see how the Google people are going to push this; Wave is not going to take off on the Internet as a general email/IM replacement (but it may take off within Intranets or with communities making use of proprietary Google services) until it gets adopted as a standard — that is until other providers start deploying ‘Wave’ services and interaction between them is assured. If Google achieves in making it a standard, it can most certainly replace both e-mail and IM in one fell swoop.

I wish I had more time to play around with Wave right now. In any case, I have a feeling I’m going to be writing more about Wave in the future, so stay tuned.

Google Wave, a new API/protocol and platform was presented on Google I/O. It’s a hosted, embeddable communications and collaboration platform that introduces quite a few interesting features that are currently either not available or require multiple service vendors/providers. It was written in Java/GWT.

Google has made it clear that the protocol is going to be open and there will be open source [reference] versions of the server and client, although someone could — theoretically — write their own before that by following the specifications on the aforementioned site. Wave includes Robots and Gadgets which are server and client-side applications [respectively]. The former are automated participants for waves and gadgets are applications that run on the client and allow for new input methods. Google is also allowing for embedding of waves on third-party websites through the Wave Embed API.

This is a great project by Google, which, of course, is going to be a building block [and trojan horse] for online collaboration; viz. Google Office + Collaboration; features that might, in the not-so-distant future, render Microsoft’s workhorse [Office] dead. The fact that they are open sourcing the whole thing is fantastic news.

While the potential is there — and is undoubtedly great — I believe that we should be careful before judging how disruptive Wave is going to be in the next few years. Many technically interesting projects have withered and died for numerous reasons, sometimes political other purely business. Wave is probably going to be extremely useful for intranets from the very beginning. The reason for this is that it’s very easy to use the Wave infrastructure where a single server hosts the service. But its promise, its full potential lies in the fact that its an Open System; it might become an extremely disruptive technology for the whole ‘net. Besides replacing all sorts of pointless centrally hosted services [twitter, disqus, facebook], the Federation protocol is probably the single most impressive thing about Wave; it assures interoperability and maximises plurality without creating walled gardens. What’s more, that the protocol is open and that the code is open source means that in the future the Wave platform might evolve into a fully distributed protocol. The Openness of Wave and the Federation Protocol is the single most impressive, brave decision I’ve seen Google take and one that elevates Wave well above other similar technologies.

To the Google team behind Wave, in the words of their own Lars Rasmussen: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” =)