Early Google Wave Dissection

(guest blog by Steven Devijver)

Over the last couple of days I wrote a seven-part analysis on Google Wave. I have looked at different aspects of the platform and wrote this overview for your convenience.

Part 1: Architecture

Google Wave is based on an associative memory architecture which is unique in the world of social platforms. As with e-mail anybody is free to host their own Wave provider which Google will release as open-source. Because of its architecture a Wave provider never leaks content to the outside when a wave is between participants on the same server, just as with e-mail.

This is a huge benefit of Google Wave because now any organization can deploy its own Wave provider for its own people and prevent sensitive content from leaving the safety of their private networks.

Part 2: Unified Messaging

Like Twitter, e-mail and instant messaging Google Wave has the free-text message as its content model. Yet Wave is different. First of all, participants can be machines in the form of robots. Secondly, participants can add any kind of content to a wave: text, chatting, video, pictures, gadgets, … . Thirdly, each participant can instantly become a co-author.

The Wave team has understood that unified messaging is really about two things: each content type requires certain kinds of communication (e.g. instant messaging requires P2P communication), and content types are defined by our internal articulations rather than by its technical characteristics. In other words, the Wave team has understood that content is a social object as has build the Wave platform accordingly.

Part 3: Extensibility

Robots and gadgets are first-class citizens in Google Wave. This means a robot can modify the content of a wave just as a human can. In the demo video we see several examples of this: converting www.google.com to http://www.google.com and the fabulous spell checker.

Yet the real power of extensibility is that anybody can build third-party additions for their own purposes. These robots can be hosted on any Wave provider, the only thing that is required is to add a robot as a participant to a wave.

Part 4: Collaboration

Google Wave will dramatically change the way we work together as soon as we realize that the waves we create can be harvested for metadata. With this metadata we’ll be able to build smarter robots that know us better.

Part 5: Version Control

Google Wave is not just a collaborative word processor, it also comes with a distributed version control system built in. This is a significant feature, especially for long-term group collaborations.

There are many open-source version control tools available but they’re used by software developers and don't lend themselves for integration in productivity suites like Office or Google Wave. That is way the Wave team has taken the ideas behind Git and built a new version control system for collaboration.

Part 6: Social Network Platform

Google Wave is not just an awesome social platform, it will dramatically change our expectation of what a social platform has to do for us. In general, social platforms have to be able to evolve with the users and communities they host. Facebook and Ning are notoriously unable to do this while Twitter is notorious lenient towards the conventions its users prefer.

It's probably true that complicated data models for social platforms as sported by Facebook and Ning are not a thing of the future. Instead, free-form content models like Wave and Twitter give much more freedom and allow us to organize unified messaging as we see fit.

Part 7: Marketplace

Many business problems are hard to solve for the same reasons that social platform like Facebook and Ning are not very malleable: it's painful and expensive to let dedicated data models evolve with reality. Look at CRM tools, look at sales tools, look at procurement tools. They all suffer from the same design flaw.

Enter Google Wave. We can integrate any business information we want to keep close in Wave through robots and gadgets. Businesses will demand that these third-party extensions run on their own networks. Et voila, the soon-to-be booming market of third-party Wave extensions.

I've enjoyed writing about Google Wave and the response has been overwhelming. Thank you. I'm looking forward to the actual release of Wave and working with others to make their Wave dreams come true.