Google Wave
Wow—really inspiring and in-depth beta demo from Google about their upcoming product Google Wave. I had seen headlines of the announcement last week, but it was Andy Ihnatko's thoughtful Sun-Times article that got me to sit down and watch the 80-minute presentation. Some good quotes from the article:
Wave is an ambitious, brand-new infrastructure for communication in general ... Wave is hugely ambitious. Which means that it’s bound to fail.
I have no idea whether it'll fail (I hope not) but it will depend on the implementation. I second Ihnatko's assertion that no other company could pull this off. He rightly points out that Microsoft would be too concerned with monetizing it, and Apple would be too concerned with tightly controlling every aspect of it. That's probably true, but I think it's also because no other company can come with the level of web magic that Google can.
As a developer, it's really a joy to behold them reinventing the web every year or so. Gmail, then Maps, Reader, Docs, then Maps again, and now Wave.
They basically sat down and were like "we're going to reinvent email. And while we're at it, all other forms of internet communication. But let's not try to own it, because then it won't work."
Who else does that? Part of their demo shows how a direct competitor can develop a skin for their implementation and not interact with Google at all. That's just amazing.
Via Sun Times via Daring Fireball
What an amazing concept. I think there was a movie a couple of years back called “Pay it Forward.” Well, I may be a little off on its story-line, but I’m grateful to Josh for throwing his “matchstick” on the fire that “wave” appears to be. (Right now, it looks like Google is making all the right moves with it – time will tell whether it’s something as useful as the ancien email which is certainly its “daddy” … or as useless/pointless as tweets, to which it’s certainly some kind of cousin.)