There has been a lot written about Google Wave. Miguel Helft provided a nice overview, Google Showcases New Communication and Collaboration Tool. David Coursey asked, is Google Wave a Twitter Killer? and Dion Hinchcliffe discussed, the enterprise implications of Google Wave. John Moore wrote about how Google Wave could be a great CRM for the small to mid size business market and I am sure many other applications built on top of Google Wave will follow.

Paula Thornton urged me to watch the long video demonstration (hour+) of Google Wave and we discussed where Wave might go. I finally had a chance to do this and wanted to share my notes and impressions. Paula looked at a draft of this post and gave me comments but I take responsibility for any remaining short comings.

Lars Rasmussen was the master of ceremonies and introduced Google Wave as a communication and collaboration tool. It is Open Source with robust APIs, and built leveraging the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). They introduced it at a developer’s conference to encourage others to build apps on top of Wave.  I would agree here. I think that Wave has great potential but its potential will be best realized through focused applications that sit on top of its very open structure. Most people like more than a blank slate, even a very robust one that does things not done before. More on this later.

Lars said that email was invented 40 years ago, before the Web. They wanted to create email as if it was a new thing today with the Web in mind. I can see this in what they did. As Lars said, email was created to work like “old school” mail. You send mail and you receive mail and you send more mail back. With Google Wave you work in the same space and just keep editing the same content if you want or interjecting comments anywhere in the content. It is much more collaborative and conversational — it takes greater advantage of what the Web can do.

You can also drag and drop stuff such as pictures from your desktop anywhere into the conversation that is happening in a Wave. Things are no longer sequential. However, if you want to see the sequence of how the conversation got built you can use the Playback feature to get a “movie” of the construction of the conversation.

This is transformative, similar to the transition from typewriters to word processing changed writing except more so. With Wave you see the new content emerging as it is typed simultaneously on all computer screens that are tuned into the Wave.  There is no sending back and forth, it just ‘is’. There is no ‘there’ — just a global ‘here’. There is no linear transactional and temporal exchange between individuals, it’s all ‘now’. They even showed four people editing the same document at the same time.  This might get chaotic. You can set privacy levels so you decide which people see the new content emerging.

Lars discussed ways to organize Waves. I think this will be important. In my view that was a flaw in del.icio.us and is a potential issue with Twitter, What do you do as you start to create massive amounts of content? That was a problem for me with del.icio.us and is starting to be an issue with Twitter. I use Twitter to record interesting links for future exploration but after a few weeks it may be hard to find them.  Wave does provide tagging and you can embed a search field. However, the better feature is the way you can embed Waves within Waves by drag and drop. This allows you to create tables of contents and indexes in a “master” Wave that links to the details within each Wave.

Lars and his colleagues next covered the extensions offered with Wave to enable development of applications by others outside Google, as well as inside. They gave examples of applications that they built using these extensions.  One I liked was a smart spell checker that looked at the context of the word. For example icland is an icland was transformed to Iceland is an island. Another automatically put in links. 

You can also make extensions that integrate with other tools such as Twitter. You can write tweets in Wave and they appear in Twitter or vice versa. Of course, other Twitter related apps also do this. They showed how Wave could be integrated with an issue tracker. You can take comments from Wave and load them into the issue tracker.

I think this integration and the development of more focused capabilities that sit on top of Wave will be key to its success. As I mentioned earlier, I think that the completely open Wave will get some use as a novelty and even as a collaboration platform. However, it is too open ended for many work applications, as people will not want to recreate the functionality and features. It can potentially serve as a meeting point for applications. On the other hand, people might want to shape application themselves and not be forced to follow the structure of existing applications.

Since Wave may serve as a useful meeting place for applications, it may not replace many but become a useful platform. Paula pointed out t me that Dion Hitchcliffe wrote a preamble to this in 2006, Blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 as the next application platform. I talked with a number of venders who said they were first afraid that Sharepoint would be a heavy competitor. However, they discovered it opened more doors than it closed. Sharepoint is getting more companies involved with collaboration and these venders can integrate with it to bring in their specialized functionality to a bigger audience. I think a similar thing many happen if Google Wave takes off. It certainly has expanded the playing field and should be a positive thing for enterprise 2.0. Like many tools, I do not think it will live up to its wildest supporters or act in the market the way its hardest critics propose.