I have considered writing this blog post for the past couple of days but sanity stopped me. Unfortunately, I can no longer contain my excitement. Google Wave is going to be awesome! However, this article is merely a product of speculation. Currently Google Wave is only open to a small number of developers but it is expected to be released later this year.

Why on Earth is Google Wave relevant for this PR Blog? Quite simply, after Google had developed Google Maps they sat back and then got ambitious. Imagine the scene, many geeks (but geniuses) sat in a room. One of these geeks makes an observation, “Email is a bit old, isn’t it?” Perhaps a small silence and then an agreement “Lets sort this problem out” and so Google Wave was born. The possible future of internet communication.

Google Wave is an attempt to replace the email and quite rightly so. Email has been around since the early 1980s and the internet has changed so much since then. Incidentally this has caused communication technology to change as well. The introduction of the 21st Century saw an explosion in social networking. Users were easily able to communicate with each other, not just through text but through the mediums of image and video. We saw the rise of Myspace, Bebo and then Facebook came onto the scene.

Mulling over the playing field

Originally Facebook was developed purely for university students to contact each other. I remember the days when Facebook was widely unknown. I know because I was passionate for it to develop but nobody else seemed to know about the social networking sites’ existence! Only one of my older friends used it and then things changed. Younger people joined it from Secondary schools and original Facebook users made groups such as “Keep Facebook only for University Students”. There must be a few groups still out there if you search for them. Then older people began to join in greater numbers and to this day the average age of user on Facebook is meant to be around 40 years of age. Don’t think social networking is just for younger people.

I’m discussing Facebook because I think Google Wave could be a real contender against this now popular social networking website. Some of you may have noticed how the near future of social networking seems to be all about social networking integration. Some social networking websites are built for different purposes in mind.

• Last.fm keeps a record of the music you listen to and builds charts
• Twitter allows you to update your happenings/ideas on the move
• deviantART provides a service to share drawn images and photos
• Forums always have a particular topic focus (gaming, programming, religion)

Above are some of the sites I have used but I much bigger list can be found on Wikipedia here. The list provides a scale of how large social networking has become.

The main reason why Facebook has dated so much is that it simply does not officially support any other social networking websites. Some third party applications can be found to run on Facebook (also third party in the sense no agreement has been made with Facebook) but in my experience none of these programmes have perfected the art to keep content organised. Unlike Facebook, Google have kept Google Wave open source. This means that developers can freely change code and develop programmes for Google Wave. However, Google have left themselves open for attack through this since it would be very easy for a competitor to use Google Wave’s code and develop their own Wave platform. Quite simply Google have said that Wave is such an insightful product that they will need the full support from the developers’ community, much like they asked for when constructing Android, Chrome and Google Maps.

So what is the Wave in Google Wave?

From what I can gather the Wave in Google Wave is actually the tree like structure in which conversations are set up. Many of you may experience some déjà vu when you see the structure of Google Wave as shown in the picture below.

What is important to remember about Google Wave is that essentially the foundations of the programme have arguably been copied from already existing social networking solutions. The user feed is very similar to the updates which can be found on Twitter. Conversations take place in a format which is commonly seen on Forum systems but with Facebook’s ability to comment on individually written pieces of a conversation.

Keep in mind that Google Wave is not offering an alternative social networking website but instead the intention to replace the current emailing system. As the program is open source it will be possible for companies to replace their current aged email systems with the Google Wave application. This will allow easier group conversation but still keeping options for closed and private chat.

The aspects which make me wet

Social networking integration! Finally I will have a program which will allow me to easily organise Twitter and share updates with family, friends and co-workers. This integration will spread to other social networking websites as developers take control of the benefits of Wave.

Everything in Google Wave is set up in real time. When you write a reply to a message it will be possible for the recipient to see you type that message character by character. Not only is this challenging programming wise as it pushes against the limits of HTML5 but it is a pretty cool! Don’t worry though, if you are like me and spend ages rewriting pieces this feature can be turned off. This real time aspect of Google Wave includes anything which might be added to the conversation/wave.

Uploading photos onto the internet still involves the familiar browse button and file selection window. If you want to upload photos to Google Wave then all you have to do is drop and drag your image onto the browser window. The image will then automatically upload itself to the location you set it. For this Google have filed a request to have the programming standards changed since an add-on is currently required for this feature.

Google Wave after a while will be filled with many different conversations and content which needs to be easily organised. It will be possible to place previous or different Wave discussions into various conversational threads. This will be useful if you want to talk about a past topic or share some useful information. There are also different organisational tools such as the ability to tag items and categorise under subject headings. Of course you will have your simple search box to look through all your files and folders.

That’s all folks!

I have written over 1000 words about a program which I haven’t yet even used in person and so I think I will end this article here. If you are still interested in Google Wave after my ramblings then check out the Google Wave release video. It goes into far more depth than I have and is spoken by the people who have spent the past couple of years developing the software.

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