Google Wave was previewed last week, along with the launch of Microsoft’s Bing (which it is rumored, is, run on Linux). On a quick aside, what could be deemed as Google’s answer to Bing seems to have become available in Labs. Google Squared looks like it will try to take on Bing and Wolfram Alpha – it’s already beaten Bing but has some way to go to compete with Wolfram on the whole computational knowledge thing.
Google Wave was (inadvertently) launched at i/o last week by it’s developers, headed up by Lars and Jens Rasmussen. Quite a few people have criticised the product launch as it was pretty unrehearsed and pretty poorly presented. Apple’s presentations are always smooth and clean, which is true. But I think these critics are missing the point. The whole reason behind the presentation was to illustrate the product to developers, and it wasn’t supposed to be the official product launch. I suppose then, the mistake was putting the whole keynote address on the front page of wave.google.com, in similar fashion to a product how-to.
After watching the video I was left thinking it looked pretty cool. The system looks awesome: if you wanted to reply to something I had written here (and this was powered by Blogger, which it isn’t) then you’d highlight the word, click the reply option that appeared by your mouse point and your comment would appear inline. Most impressively this would appear in my Google wave account in realtime: each character appears as it’s typed.
Google Chrome was launched as a “reinvention of the browser” – what browsers would look like if they were invented today. Now they’re moving on to email – and I think Wave is how email would look if it were invented this weekend. But nobody’s abandoning email or throwing in the proverbial IM towel – to have a revolution there has to be an uprising. And without everybody sending Waves how do you use it: can you email from it? How do you contact someone with a Hotmail address? How do you send somebody outside of Google Wave a blip (a blip is “a unit of conversation” – lot’s of blips make a wave)? The answer to these questions is that you can’t. External developers have been tasked with creating API applications to meet these demands: that was the purpose of the i/o presentation. But I don’t want to send my emails through an external developers server. Nor do I want my blog falling in to my email account and my friends leaving random comments on my sites. I have enough qualms about sending data from the iPhone OS which is essentially virus proof – I don’t want to be working with third party applications from my desktop.
Everybody’s been asking when Google will make a desktop word processor (I’m becoming addicted to Google Docs) or an operating system – I think this is there answer: they won’t. Rather than take on Microsoft with a rival OS they’ll make something new, revolutionary and unique – a OS in the browser. Maybe this will be the future, but I can’t see it happening tomorrow.