Google has done it! They have made the biggest problem in the world a bit smaller! Communication. With Wave.

The communication problem

The biggest problem of humanity now is communication. With communication we become aware of knowledge, problems and can combine ideas to solve anything. With better communication better matches of people can be made and better ideas can come to fruition.

If you look inside any medium to large sized company or government agency you see structures of departments. Each have their own task and the chain of command connects them to keep them on the road. Over the years they all had different means of communication and these days almost all depend entirely on E-mail…

E-mail is the glue that keeps our society standing.

E-mail is locked in to each workers own mailbox and you communicate by sending a text to one others mailbox. E-mails are fragments of the discussion and it is very difficult to see the discussion as a whole. It is not easy to stitch the fragments together.

There are many 2.0 tools to fix the problems of e-mail. But none are really mainstream as e-mail itself. The 2.0 tools now seemed to be experiments awaiting to be picked for their parts to combine into something new.

The best text edit ideas combined.

Google looked at any tool for text based communication and took the best parts to combine it in one tool.

• They began to look at E-mail message and reply model. They picked the interface so people could quickly see what the new messages are and could quickly reply.
• They centralized the whole communication process like any 2.0 tool so discussions could easily be shared between people.
• They took the search capabilities of the google search engine so anything could be easily found.
• They took the instant way of communicating from instant messaging. Replies are added instantaniously.
• They took the real time appearing text from google docs and its collaborative writing.
• They took the inclusion of people in discussions from chat rooms.
• They took the tags/labels from gmail and social bookmarking sites like delicious to organize your waves..
• They took the history function from wikipedia, svn/cvs and google docs and even evolved it by opening it up with an instant slider.
• They took the linking to other texts(waves) from wikipedia and html so you can create a network of texts and overviews.
• They took the bots from IRC and evolved them into robots that listen in on the text to give instant reactions or text transformations. They can also post any text to another text medium. (expect tie-ins to create archaic e-mail, word docs, blog posts, social networks (facebook wall), twitters, wiki articles, forum threads, sms messages and anything text)
• They took the external widget model from google maps so a wave can be included into anything.
• They took the internal widget model from open social so you can include widgets into waves for games, polls, task lists, spreadsheets, presentations, anything…
• They took the protocol model form e-mail. Anybody can start a wave server and communicate with other wave servers. Discussions internal to one wave server will never leave to wave servers of others. It is an open standard. Anybody can create own servers and clients.

There is much more. The first implementation is a full HTML 5 web app with drag and drop support for the waves themselves and images with instant uploaders. The first robots include instant google maps tie ins, instant translation (wow) and very advanced natural language spell checkers.

Wave: The future of collaborative text

Wave is set to be the social glue of anything text. It is set up to combine the very best collaborative text ideas to create the e-mail replacement for the next century. It is here to solve many communication problems. Everybody can easily include it in any current 2.0 tool to create the ultimate inbox. Are you leaving a message/comment anywhere? And want to track it with probable reactions down? Expect it in your wave in-box.

Missing the focus: a Wave Tsunami

Wave is great to centralize any text discussion to one in-box. With the google instant search and tags you can find many stuff easily.

But you will be drowned quickly in waves when any text based communications from any site is centralized into one in-box. A true wave Tsunami. I don’t want all my messages in one in-box with only a search function. The in-box is a metaphor created for easy transition from e-mail but is not the right way to organize your waves. It is like the first car: a horse cart without horses.

In this time of information overload our main problem is focus. We need to filter the waves on context. Filter them for example on work for project A or own interests on hobby B or social life on sporting group b. We need tree maps (work>projectA) to navigate our contexts to see our contacts quickly. We need tag clouds, social diagrams, wave source maps. We need next gen wave organization tools.

The tags are already there to make this possible. But who is going to build the next gen wave client to create this focus?

Wavesurfer? Surfboard? Baywatch? oscillator/oscilloscope? Frequencies? Many names are possible for such an app

With such client based on personal context a true semantic web will become possible.

Everything about the Wave.