Google Wave Gears up for Massive Preview

As readers of this site are well aware, e-mail has a good solid 30 year history of being the internet communication method of choice. It certainly has not gone unchallenged during this time – ideas such as instant messaging, forums, wikis and recently Twitter and social networks have all tried to establish themselves in the communication business with varying degrees of success. At the end of the day e-mail is by far in the lead and most of these services hook into e-mail as the de facto base line for communication online. A forum may send you an e-mail when your thread is replied to, and heavy users of social networking tools actually use e-mail even more.

Now for the first time Google’s challenge to e-mail is becoming available to the public. Google Wave is a new communication and collaboration tool from Google which tomorrow will launch for public testing by 100,000 selected users.

Google Wave has been described as ‘modern e-mail’ solution, or e-mail reinvented. Essentially a mashup of e-mail, chat, wiki and collaborative work tools, the tool allows two or more people communicate in real time on plans, projects and digital documents. The focus is on a single conversation rather than on individual messages, a concept related to threads in regular e-mail software, but taken to the next step.

In a video published in May the creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen, known best for their previous success Google Maps, showed the software in action. In the demo Lars Rasmussen plans out a vacation trip with another person and we see the conversation being built up from individual messages, photos and wiki like text blocks. This all happens with live updates so that the other person can see what’s happening immediately. Later a third person is invited to the conversation, similar to how you would invite another collaborator to a Google Doc.

An ongoing Google Wave conversation.

Critics have been quick to point out that Google Wave may be too complex a product, and that the success of the web is built on simplicity. Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft said that Google Wave “is anti-web”. There is certainly no doubt that Google Wave is complex as most technology writers, including this one, struggle to describe the product in less than a paragraph. You could call it a ‘conversation focused collaboration tool’ but you really have to see it in action to get a feel for it. Regular e-mail on the other hand can handily be described by its very name “electronic mail” and people immediately get it.

While it is probably the simplicity of e-mail which has made it so long lasting, the ability to easily back up e-mail and to apply automatic tools to it have certainly helped too. You could print out an e-mail for safekeeping but a Google Wave with its threaded conversations and history is harder to envision on paper. Similarly automatic tools don’t apply in an obvious way: if you filter your e-mail today for messages with only a certain subject line for instance, how would you do the same with a Google Wave conversation without breaking it apart?

It’s obvious that smart people are working on this tool and surely they will implement solutions to these problems. But will their potential users have enough patience to learn these new concepts when they instead could just fire off a simple e-mail?

The invitations for Google Wave will be only be available to select early testers and people who signed up early.