The Wave project was introduced to developers last week, and since I wasn’t at the Developer’s preview and I have been only hearing bits of pieces of from various sources about it. I have had a hard time wrapping my head around it, and thus haven’t mentioned it here.
The best I could come up with was, it’s a communications system, it replaces email, and IM… Ohhh kay.
Well world beloved Tech Pundit, and my personal hero Andy Ihnatko has done (as to be expected) an outstanding job explaining it. Click the title link above to be taken to the Chicago Sun-Times site and read his article in all it’s glory, and watch the 80 minute You Tube Video of Google showing it off.
Normally this would be the place where I try to sum up what Andy wrote in his article so that you could decide if you really needed to click through to it or not. But I honestly can’t do Andy or Wave near the justice it deserves. So instead I am going to paste a few quotes from Andy’s article and encourage you to click through if you want to know more.
“I imagine that there are as many pitfalls to defining and explaining Wave as Westinghouse and Edison found when trying explaining the concept of the electrical grid to the masses. You plug a light bulb into the socket and the crowd oohs and aahs and assumes that Electricity is all about illumination; it’s a marvelous way of producing light without the open flames or soot of candles and oil lamps. Technically that’s true, but it misses the point.”
“It would indeed be possible for me to use Wave the same way that I use email. But then I’d be just as clueless as the middle-manager who uses email like handwritten letters … printing them out on paper, adding some handwritten notes, and then mailing or faxing it back to the sender.”
“Oh, and remember: the “put this on SunTimes.com” robot is part of the Wave. He sees that change, too. So my edits immediately reflected on the website. In fact, anybody who happened to have been reading the column at the time could see each of those changes being applied, at the very instant that I was making them, one at a time.”
“Once again: Wave is electricity, not illumination. It’s “communication” and not any one specific way of communicating anything to anybody.”
“Wave is hugely ambitious. Which means that it’s bound to fail.
But I’m betting that it’ll thrive. Wave is open and infinitely-extensible, and those are the two things it most needs to be.”
“Of course no one can say what will become of Wave when it’s rolled out to users sometime around the end of the summer. It could prove to be much less than the demo. Let’s not forget that the humans are a baffling and unpredictable species that doesn’t always know what’s best for itself.”
Well if that simultaneously confuses and yet interests you, well welcome to the club. Again if this hit the “interest” part of your brain more than the “confuse”, please click the title link for this article and check out Andy’s full text, and the attached video.
As for me, I’m still not exactly sure what to make of it, but like anything completely brand new and out of left field, it’s exciting. I can’t wait to see this hit a public beta.
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