Google Wave Overview

Next Agenda, from its inception in the summer of 2008, has positioned itself as pushing the boundaries of next generation web collaboration built around innovative uses of web video, and taking advantage of the most innovative tools of web collaboration that are being developed in various places in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world. Early on, we established ourselves as leading innovators in this space, a collection of experts who were genuinely committed to developing the front edge of these very important tools. Because of this, we became involved with Google, in a very early phase of development with their really pioneering effort in developing Google Wave.

Google had decided several years ago to allow a very elite team that had developed Google Maps into such a successful product, to try to build a next generation web collaboration tool called Wave that was quite ambitious in its vision. In one way, they were trying to reinvent email 30 years after it actually was invented, considering all the capabilities of always-on, high bandwidth connections and all the things that were not available when email first emerged. That was the opening challenge.

Soon, what Wave became was an attempt by Google to do several things: one was integrate all the disparate tools of web collaboration that have been used scattershot before, which would be the ability, as with Wikis, to work on common documents, the ability of instant messaging to spontaneously communicate back and forth, in real time, as well as the ability of discussion boards to keep coherent discussions going, particularly with many people and over long periods of time. They built an integrated platform that integrated all of these into one comprehensive tool, which was Google Wave.

The team also did some serious innovation to solve problems that had been perennially plaguing anyone on the web in the nascent web collaboration space, such as how you bring a newcomer up to speed in a complex, evolved discussion. Google had integrated a feature that could essentially play back the entire Wave, from its inception on through, much like watching a video - with a play back and a pause, and a fast forward button. This innovative feature allowed newcomers to quickly get up to speed before they jumped in at the place the discussion where everybody was currently focused. This, among many other innovations, started to really make Wave attractive to developers who had been struggling with issues like this.

The third thing they did was they built Wave as a platform that was open to other developers like Next Agenda and others, to tailor applications to important pieces of collaboration that Google wouldn't cover, such as voting, ranking, and a common whiteboard. Or, how would you collaborate with people who are working in different languages? Developers could develop applications that would, say, simultaneously translate passages, integrate voting functions, and embed videoconferencing. These apps, in fact, were being developed by a variety of developers.

Wave, in sum, was turning into a quite exciting new tool, one that was representing a step-change in what large groups of people could actually do, how they could cooperate in a nuanced fashion and work together around complex issues using sophisticated, evolved techniques that they weren't able to do in previous, crude discussion boards, email, and scattershot of other isolated tools.

When Google opened Wave up to a very select group of developers in the late summer of 2009, Next Agenda was among those earliest pioneers, which Google allowed to use the tool way in advance of public use, when a handful of about 100,000 accounts was given out. Our entire community was given accounts, and we were able to meet regularly with Google engineers and evolve our use of it and get feedback and help from them to help them improve their product as well as help us evolve our tailored use of it.

In fact, we used Google Wave, in some of our projects, including the Clean Energy Challenge, outlined here, and also started to use it in other projects, including the Institute for New Economic Thinking, profiled elsewhere. We also used Google Wave internally as one of our core tools, which allowed our tightly coordinated but often dispersed team to work very efficiently and productively. Everything seemed to be going gangbusters.

Google opened Wave publically in May 2010, and we at Next Agenda were very excited about the ability to use this tool with other clients and help other organizations leverage what we thought was an incredibly useful tool. In a surprise to us, as well as the developer community and the general public at large, Google made a surprise announcement in July 2010, just months after they had opened Wave to the public, in which they decided to discontinue the development of Wave any further, mostly because they said they did not see the public adoption of the tool to the level they felt was warranted to dedicate resources.

The general understanding is that there were about a million people actively using Wave, and certainly Next Agenda and our community and our clients were among them. But for Google, that was not sufficient to continue developing, because Google is a company that deals with a much larger scale than millions, and they felt for business reasons, they couldn't continue. That said, there is a very dedicated and fanatical crew that appreciates Wave's capabilities, and Google has agreed to open-source the bulk of the code and there will probably be efforts by other developers to further improve this tool, allowing others to continue using it as an offering for certain organizations who want to really use its powerful capability in the future.

Even if Wave is not really a useful offering for the majority of organizations any time soon, we do see it as a great sign that's heralding all kinds of ambitious new work around web collaboration, in Silicon Valley and in other groups around the world, including Next Agenda. Although we are disappointed that we don't have Wave to immediately offer to clients as we expected, we are confident that this frontier of sophisticated web collaboration is making great progress and big strides are happening in the immediate future. We are going to see dramatic shifts in what is possible to do online.