OK, I've finally sat down and looked a little more at what this newfangled Google Wave is. It's been getting the sort of buzz that accompanies announced products destined either for unrivaled success or cataclysmic failure. After watching the first 20 minutes of the demo and reading an article about it, I'm convinced it'll be the former.

I could write a long thing detailing all the features in Google Wave as demoed, and about why each is important, but I don't feel like it. The links in the last paragraph will give a full picture. The basic usage of it is a bit like email, but it's also real-time like Google Docs. Everything you type shows up on everyone else's screen as you type it. It extends Gmail's big innovation, the "conversation", to its logical conclusion.

But instead of just inviting people to a conversation, you can invite robots, who can then do things to that conversation. So you could invite a Blogger robot, who would immediately post the content to a blog, and any changes made thenceforth will also be published automatically. Since Wave is just a realtime, back-and-forth communication standard, which also stores history, another example of "a Wave", as demoed, is a chess game My god, the extensibility

Most importantly, it's not just a hosted service, the real innovation here is that it's a protocol like email itself. So Yahoo Mail could introduce some Wave features, or some other company could come along and make such a killer Wave site that they steal all of the customers away from Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and even Google's own Wave site. Email is a small protocol that aims to do one thing really well, and it was the thing people really needed to do well in the 80's, 90's, and 00's. Wave is a rich protocol, or perhaps a set of simple protocols, that try to model what people need in the 10's. Email is basic communication; Wave is basic collaboration. Before long, the capital "W" in Wave will become lowercase by default.

This is all assuming they don't screw it up. But I don't think they will, because as the earlier article claims, Google is exactly the right company to do this:

Microsoft could have thought of it. But they'd have argued internally about ways to monetize it. Apple could certainly have thought of it. But then they'd have argued internally about the need to keep the technology proprietary and to control and limit everything, including the future of the standard and the scope of what people are allowed to do with it.

Both companies would have ruined it. Google seems to be doing everything right. They're defining Wave, but then they're more or less letting go of it. The sole benefit that they seem to be retaining is their 18-month headstart on the rest of the developer community.

You know it's true. This philosophy towards software and innovation is starkly different from other companies; nobody else Just Gives It Away like this. It is this approach that led to Android, and retains my faith in them even when they show signs of becoming just Another Big Company. I think Wave will be a success, but even if it's not, their demo alone will inspire other people to achieve the same ambition. Either way, I think we've seen a glimpse of what the next decade of the Web will look like.