Eric Frenkiel

A Shiny, New Web App!

Google Wave has been heralded as the next Big Thing – an ambitious blend of real time chat, email, collaboration, file sharing, and more.  Did I mention there are robots thrown into the mix too?

When you login to Google Wave for the first time, you feel a bit disoriented.  Sure, you recognize  a few components of a basic email application  – contacts, an inbox, a preview pane – but there’s something decidedly different.  You notice little things that seem strange at first: You can “mute” a wave? You can rewind a wave and play it back?  You can splice a wave into a new conversation?

And indeed you can.  It’s clear that Google Wave isn’t just a new web application, it’s really a new way of thinking about how we can communicate with one another.

Robots

After the initial exploratory phase, you can graduate to more interesting features – like robots.  A wave is intrinsically fluid, extensible, and dynamic, and in this uncanny ecosystem, a robot is a natural way to extend a wave.  A robot is typically used for a simple and extremely repetitive task, crawling/spidering the web, for example.  We call them ‘bots because they can be released into the “wild,” functioning quite well without a human for the duration of the task.

Google has flipped this notion on its head in Google Wave, because now a robot is tasked with helping you on a personal level.  What’s more, Google has anthropomorphized the bots.  Each has a cute little name like something out of the Seven Dwarfs.  There is Debuggy for debugging, Stocky for stock prices, and Tweety for Twitter integration, just to name a few.

A robot can be as simple as replacing links (Bit.ly is a great robot for example), or as complicated as a wave debugger.  Once you have added a robot to the wave, they “listen” to the wave, and fix/update/change what they were assigned to do.  You can even “talk” to them and they will fetch information for you.  How cool is that!?

Gadgets

Gadgets are more straightforward than robots.  A gadget is really just a mashup with an external application.  I was able to experiment with a Google Maps gadget with another developer.  It was uncanny (there’s that word again) to see him manipulate the map in real time.  Instead of the punctuated delay of instant messaging, I was quite literally following along as he explained the map.  The sky is the limit for gadgets, but expect every sort of integration imaginable.

So, can my grandma use it?

No.  After a week of experimentation, I must echo the reservations of others that Google Wave might be too complicated for the average user.   Right now, Google Wave’s learning curve is steep.  I feel as though there must be a mandatory tutorial for first time users to familiarize the new terminology as well as demo some of the more novel features.  Learning how to use a new tool requires a bit of practice, so if this tutorial actually showed users how to add a robot, gadget, splice a wave, etc, a user could be riding the wave fairly quickly.

Summary

I do believe Google Wave has a very, very bright future ahead of it.  This application is perfect for work environments, and I think this could be a huge disruptor for 37Signals’ Basecamp collaboration application.  I don’t know if Google Wave will enjoy the same ubiquity as that of email, but I can guarantee it will improve how we all communicate and work together.