Google Wave: What's All the Fuss About?

Image by curiouslee via Flickr

By LEV GROSSMAN

For a company founded and still largely run by a bunch of engineers, Google apparently knows a lot about human nature. Just as they did with Gmail, the Googlers have made their newest product invitation-only. You can't just use Google Wave; you have to be chosen. It's like Willy Wonka and the golden ticket. By the time I finally got my Wave invitation, I actually felt grateful. In some part of my brain, I really believed that instead of using a browser-based communications app, I was attending a totally excellent party.

I guess I should be grateful, since Google Wave is both free and pretty cool. Its main defect is that it's almost impossible to explain. Google spokespeople have described Wave as what e-mail would look like if it had been invented now instead of 40 years ago. (Fun fact: the first e-mail was sent in 1971 between two Digital PDP-10 computers.) Keep in mind that until the mid-1990s, when e-mail went mainstream, the network environment was very different. Bandwidth was a scarce resource. You had your poky modem and liked it. Which is why e-mail was created in the image of the paper-postal system: tiny squirts of electronic text.(See the 50 best websites of 2009.)

But now we're rolling in bandwidth, and power-wise, my phone could make a PDP-10 cry. Google has server farms the size of actual farms. And yet we're still passing one another little electronic notes.

Google Wave rips up that paradigm and embraces the power of the networked, collaborative, postpaper world. Waves aren't static; they're active and malleable. When you send out a wave, you create a virtual object shared by you and the person or people you send it to. You can type in it, and so can everybody else who's on the wave — it's stored on a central server instead of passed from PC to PC like e-mail. Everybody sees what everybody else is typing as they type it. Everybody can edit what everybody else writes. With regular e-mail, the simple act of collaborating on a list can turn into a nightmare chain, crawling with indents and chevrons and worse. Wave keeps everything tidy.

Google Wave: What's All the Fuss About?