A Brief Overview of Google Wave

Created: 28th November 2009

Google recently sent me an invite to try out their new 'web based collaboration' tool, which I had to admit... I was quite curious about. I took them up on their kind offer (actually, they sent it to lots of people, I'm not that special!), and before I knew it, I was logged in to the new look communications tool of the future!

Before getting into the nuts and bolts of Google Wave, let me explain what it is and isn't from my personal technical opinion. Google Wave is not an operating system, and it's hardly a new social networking site - what it is however, is a real-time collaboration tool which allows you to share rich-text, pictures, and gadgets with your contacts (and by real time, I mean you can see them type). It's all about real time data sharing (once you get round the marketing terms), and it does it very well.

There's a 90 minute video detailing what Google Wave is all about (found here), which sees Lars (one of the main developers) giving an excellent presentation showing off all the best points of Wave. Though there's already enough advertising buzz out there to peak interest, so I'll just detail my personal experiences, and let you make up your own mind.

Starting Wave

Google like to remind us that Wave is still contained entirely within a HTML5 compliant web browser, and that the Google Gears plug-in is only required for Wave's drag and drop features (which they hope to make standard within HTML5), after all - Wave is all about being an open platform - free from proprietary restraints. Of course it still has to work on browsers besides Chrome, so with that, we also tested on Firefox, IE and Opera.

Naturally, we wanted to see what it was capable of without having to worry about browser specific issues, so we started it with Chrome - somewhere pretty much guaranteed to show us Wave's full potential, after logging in and playing about with some Wave's - it started to look a little something like this:

As you can see, the main interface is split into three main sections, from left to right - we have the navigation\contacts pane, the central view is your traditional inbox, and finally - the right hand side is your 'Wave'.

The first two are quite standard – similar to what you would find in many email clients, they allow you to control, navigate, search and sort your 'waves' - which you can think of as incredibly dynamic email messages (though I'm sure Google would want to distance themselves from this analogy).

We then tried Google Wave in Opera - no luck; we were warned that development hadn-t made it this far yet:

It was nice that Google hadn't referred to our browser as old or outdated, and I genuinely use Opera for everything so it wasn't like I was trying to trip Wave up, but whether it will be supported in the final version remains to be seen. We went ahead at our own peril and tried it out, we didn't get very far until it failed and presented us with:

IE was interesting – first we had to download a rather large "Google Chrome Frame", wasn't quite sure how this related to the open standards of HTML5, but considering IE8 had very little HTML5 support - it made sense that extra 'extensions' were required for IE. But once this was installed, everything worked fine, albeit a little slower then Chrome.

Firefox was fine as expected, and naturally, Safari was on the supported list.

One thing I noticed was that Wave is performed entirely over SSL, so there was no good way to get a look under the hood without using a browser plug-in such as Fiddler, but the traffic certainly did make use of the persistent connections, it's an application that will benefit from caching for sure.

Using Waves

Just like you compose a new email, you compose a new 'wave', once you've given it a title - you get the option to invite other friends to view your new wave. If they are not immediately available online, they'll see the most updated wave when they login and check their inbox, if they are online - they'll see your changes right away.

This is the basic functionality of Wave - but it goes so much further, for example, you can add more than just text:

The options along the top, displayed while editing seem quite obvious, until you move into the right hand side – where the gadgets are displayed. Once you've added gadgets to your Wave account, they become available for all new waves. And even display on other Waves regardless of whether the account has the gadget installed. Examples of gadgets include:

• Add Link
• Add Attachments
• Add Yes/No/Maybe Gadget
• Add Map
• Add AccuWeather.com Gadget

I especially liked the attachment gadget, it goes a little beyond HTML5's capabilities (in fact, it's the only feature within Google Wave that uses the Google Gears technology, but Google have requested this feature be written into the HTML 5 standard), but you're able to drag a file from your local machine, into your browser and onto a Wave - adding the attachment directly... easy ha?

All the gadgets and attachments work dynamically together within the same Wave - that is, you can edit an attachment\gadget, and the changes are instantly available to all parties, regardless of weather is an MS Document, changing the location of a map, or changing your vote in the Yes/No/Maybe gadget - it all updates in real-time.

Overall, I like it. Google Wave is quite a marvellous piece of technology, especially since it's been designed as an open system. Google hopes that companies will host their own 'Wave Servers' (we assume this is a Web Server running Google Web Toolkit, which Wave was solely designed in), and then people can wave at each other without ever having to touch a Google Server. The technology also works across domains and with other external sites; you can effectively plug an existing wave into a site so that you get the same functionality, allowing competition to form (but still using the same framework).

I'd advise you to watch the video on the Google Wave homepage, although about 90 minutes long, it really does show you the power of Wave, and some of the gadgets they are working on (for example, the language bot is awesome!), it will take some getting used to before companies are ready to convert their entire internal collaboration structure over to Google, especially since most internal corporate messaging systems are probably still quite new, but I can see how this simplifies many tasks, and they have succeeded in their goal in improving upon the now dated method of email.