It’s quite unlike me to be behind with the latest Internet craze, really unlike me intact. I used Twitter before it was endorsed on TV by Stephen Fry, I used Facebook well before the new layout, I had GMail in the first 2 days of developer preview, but I just didn’t get into the latest craze at the time I had the opportunity to.

Google Wave, the next evolutionary step for communication

The craze I’m on about is something you might have heard of, “Google Wave”. Now recently, Google hasn’t impressed me due to some issues with products of theirs that involve money, so when I read this blog post last night about whether Google Wave will replace Twitter, I was very skeptical. At the end of it there was a video of the Google IO developer conference.

I tried as hard as I could to hate the bloke running the conference, but I don’t know whether is was the tech he was showing or him, I just couldn’t help but like the whole idea of Wave.

So what does it do? Well, Wave does what Google does best. It takes something that we’re really used to, takes a sideways look at it and proceeds to change it. But it changes it in such a way that makes it new, fun and somehow easier, even though it has a million new features.

Put simply, it makes conversations, plain and simple conversations. It moves away from the conventional method of relay communication that we’re so used to and makes Wave a truely interactive experience, as if you were talking in real life, but with pictures and rich media.

There’s far too much for me to explain what it does in one post (it took Google an hour to explain it), so I’ll leave it to this video to explain:

What I’m really interested in though, is how it’s going to change our lives and is it really a good idea to have one company be able to control a majority of a major communication channel. It’s true that companies like BizStone, who own Twitter own one major communication channel, but if Wave is really set to replace as fundamental and business critical as email, then having one business control all of that communication is a bit scary.

One example is, say they’re hacked. That’s world wide business communications compromised – not good – at all. It’s not just that, but its the fact that Google seems to be gaining more and more personal information about internet users and a business that can see all communications that are going on world wide can then tailor its own products to suit the wants and needs of worldwide consumers in just about anything, thus making unfair competition.

Could Google Wave become a cloud service?

The only way that I could see Google Wave being a fair product to consumers is to be open source and have the technology hosted by a consortium of open developers and running it as a cloud service with users chipping in a bit of idle processing power here and there.

So what’s the verdict? Well I can say that I’m pretty sure that Wave will definitely be the next milestone for Google. Yes, they’ve made great maps applications and a really good email client, but none of them can overshadow their take on the search engine. I think that if there’s any product in Google’s portfolio that is going to get them remembered, other than Google Search, it’s got to be Google Wave.

For anyone interested, there’s an open public beta on the 30th where users can sign up for an account, though only the first 100,000 accounts will be accepted – fingers on the ready people!

great points, actually there is a truly opensource project happening on the web right now http://echowaves.com (even the name coincidentally sounds familiar). It was started a year ago (before anyone knew about googlewave), and it was started as an open source alternative to Campfire, so that heavily regulated corporations could run it inside their firewalls. It was initially envisioned as group chat app, but later the social networking aspect was added. As the result this app has a lot more potential of replacing twitter then googlewave. It’s like twitter but without all the twitter limitations – it does not have the 140 limit and it’s real time (and on top of that it’s open source).
Give it a try – it’s still raw and could use some developers help, but the potential is there.