Google Wave is a bold new open source project created by the web search and advertising colossus to overhaul the way messaging online works. It goes beyond what email or instant messaging is, to allow for interlaced discussions, characters updated in real-time, and the embedding and propagation of distinct waves across the web.
The technology will launch later this year and may lay the groundwork for a paradigm-shift in the nature of online messaging and the visual environment for social networking. A ‘wave’ is a streaming online creation, editable in real-time, in a collaborative format, where the line between a series of messages and responses and a jointly created document is sufficiently blurred to warrant giving the file type a new name: wave.
The wave can be transmitted across the Internet, embedded into websites and other media, and can be made partly private, partly public, with specific sections being encrypted and hidden, so that only those participants you wish to see your specific update will be able to see it. The new messaging paradigm promises to change the way international projects function, as well as the way online publications are crafted, updated and publicized.
Building on the wave paradigm, it is possible to envision how Google’s ubiquity and the viral nature of this new project could allow for turning the entire web into a vast media fabric, more integrated and interlaced than ever before, in which information gathering and information sharing are part of a constant process of refinement and linking, comment and criticism.
Waves could lead to the wikifying of all sorts of reporting media, from text reports to linked documents, to the pasting of videos covering multiple angles of a single event. And, they could lead to a process of competitive production, in which performative text (i.e. speeches, corporate platforms, terms of use, community by-laws, etc., are adapted along multiple waves to produce competing most-adaptable versions.
Initially, we can all expect the use of waves for personal communications, debate about scheduling events, parties, trips, and the like. But Google is clearly planning to apply the wave technology to enterprise settings, in which the application of the wave process is unabashedly productive and related to refining work flows or minimizing the need for travel and face-to-face meetings.
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