Get Ready for Google Wave

Over the past few years, Google has changed the way we search. Later this year, the search giant is going to reinvent how we communicate and share online with its new Google Wave application. To get a good feeling for what Google Wave’s about, imagine that your email program got a bit hungry and ate your instant-messaging client. And your wiki. Not to mention a good portion of your blog, most of your word processor, and rather large chunks of your photo-management program, along with a light dessert of a spell checker and translation software. This all-new, all-free application offers great promise for libraries. Perhaps more importantly, however, Google will release the code behind Wave as open source. This will allow widespread adoption of the platform as an open standard and encourage further customization by other companies and end users.

The demonstration video reveals a true paradigm shift that will reinvent how we communicate and collaborate online. Google Wave lets users create waves, their name for the chunks of conversation that are built up around a topic. In its most simple form, a wave could be seen as an updated combination of email and instant messaging. Waves have an offline mode in which comments are saved for the next time a user connects, but if more than one wave participant is online at the same time they can also have a real-time chat. Either way, the application wraps the conversation into a wave document that can be saved, forwarded, or otherwise manipulated like a standard email message.

On a higher level, and of great interest to librarians, is how Wave functions as a collaborative platform. Think of it as a combination of email and wiki with a touch of IM thrown in as well. Instead of having to go back and forth through multiple messages to edit a document, two or more users could collaborate on a single wave. Unlike a wiki, which waits for users to save before updating, edits to a wave appear live for all users. Comments on a section of a document can also be added as in-line messages at the point-of-need. Like a wiki, a wave tracks all of the changes made by other users and allows review of input through a playback feature.

What could this mean for the classroom? Students collaborating on an assignment could use a wave to collect, organize, and publish a final document without having to repeatedly exchange word processor files. With every change tracked and identified by username, a teacher or librarian could then be added to the wave to join the discussion. Since waves can be embedded in other sites, the final product from a group assignment, let’s say, could be shared on a library or class page. The embedded wave could, in turn, function as a platform for additional comments.

All of this communication and collaboration—the email/IM/wiki mashup of applications—is made possible by some incredible new technology, which, as open source, will likely evolve into many more topics for this column. For example, Google Wave comes with a translator robot that provides live translation of your text as you type it. Just imagine the potential for enhancing communication in schools and libraries. From breaking down language barriers in reference interviews to opening doors to global sharing of ideas, this single aspect of Google Wave is itself a “next big thing.”

Google Wave is set to be released later this year. But as an open source project, the true power of the platform won’t be fully realized until the many creative developers already working on extensions to Wave reveal just how far the envelope can be pushed. Until then, I will continue slogging through my email messages and dreaming of what is to come.