I steered clear of the Google Wave hype until David Wiley posted a short, resounding “things with the potential to completely transform the way we teach and learn come along so rarely I had to share.” I joked at CUNY WordCampEd that Google had all the makings of the killer LMS already they just needed to tie it together and re-imagine the flow (and I got this from a conversation in the wee hours of the night after Faculty Academy with Cole Camplese and Brad Kozlek), well Wave is in many ways that. In fact, it goes a step further and makes online conference/meeting tools like Eluminate, Adobe Connect, etc. all but irrelevant, for live video and voice can’t be far behind the instantaneous chat, document editing, map embedding, video watching, presentation sharing, and on and on and on.
And while I have to admit that watching the Google zombies present this app scared the hell out of me, the incessant call for applause sickened me, and the general sense that the open web has become the Google web deeply alarmed me—I still have no doubt that David Wiley’s assessment is right on, especially given the API will soon be unleashed upon an open web full of developers. I know that Google didn’t re-invent the LMS quite as I joked, but what they did is actually make it all but irrelevant by re-imagining email and integrating just about every functionality you could possibly need to communicate and manage a series of course conversations through an application as familiar and intimate as email. Genius, horrifying, but genius. And just to think UMW signed its students on to Microsoft Live this past fall! “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”
It certainly does make so many of the ideas of conversation and publishing we are all chasing after look somewhat quaint. I really don’t understand it all yet, but what I saw made me wonder if something like this, which is so rooted in the dominant technology of email, will actually make embed, RSS, collaborative editing and all the other characteristics of the social web quotidian to some large extent.
In other words, how did the School of Google come up with this innovation? I need a commentary track.
I’m excited by the prospects.
However, until someone comes along who can compete on a feature and innovation front, this kind of stuff is going to get us hook line and sinker.
All it takes with Wave, to do virtually anything one wants, is to build an extension via the open APIs. Since it was a browser based app, I’m not sure how extensions will be implemented and will they require Google gatekeeping? Hopefully, you’ll simply sign in with your Google ID and customize extensions from a repository.
I digress. Not only does this hold great promise for both asynchronous and synchronous messaging targeted at educational needs, but when you really look at it, the potential exists to be a real killer for IM, Twitter and most other forms of informal text-based communications.
Google will continue to empire build because of features and ease-of-use, kind of like Apple should have.
That means that institutions that can’t or don’t want to use Google (any university in Canada for example) can just install Wave on their own servers and leave Google out of the picture.
I think the goal from a Google standpoint is to make email redundant. They know that that would be impossible if they made everything Google, so they had to make it nice and open (well that’s what they said anyway). Let’s hope they stick to that promise.
I’m not sure Google has any desire to kill email at all. I think it still comes down to indexing as much of everything as possible. When you add this kind of collaboration to search, maps, email, groups, profiles, street view, Earth, etc, and you begin to tie them together and knowing which users are doing what, it becomes very powerful.
In truth, I think Google’s endgame is more about building the social graph of the web and making most other communication tools redundant.
The biggest impact of gwave will be its disruptiveness to established (and establishing) brands. The faster something like wave is adopted, the faster it flatlines the competition by changing the rules of the game. Open source and open API just accelerates the change.
Thanks for all the comments here. Once again I thought this was a throw away, but from it I found out that we actually may be able to host and exercise some local control over the Wave is amazing when you think about it. It makes the whole idea of that is much more tha open API, but open source, that much more powerful.