Google Wave: End of Email?

Google I/O, a web developer focused conference, took place this year May 27-28, 2009 in San Fransico and featured many different sessions covering everything from Google Chrome, the Google App Engine, and Android.  But this years Google I/O also was chosen to be the place Google would unveil its next big product to the developer world and plans to fully launch it later this fall.

The keynote for day 2 was presented by Lars and Jens Rasmussen.  For those that follow Google closely those two names may sounds fairly familiar.  That’s because these are the same two brothers that created Google Maps back in 2004.  This time they were not showing off their spectacular Internet mapping software, but a completely new and intriguing project called Google Wave.

Google Wave has been in the works for a year or two now, but was just now shown to the world.  After Google Maps, the Rasmussen brothers were trying to figure out what would come next and Google Wave was born.  The idea behind Google Wave started out as the question of “What would email look like if it were invented today?”  Email and the basics of instant messaging are now a 40-year old technology.  With everything the Internet has to offer today, the idea of communication is vastly different that it was back then.  So the Rasmussen brothers went to work and Google Wave was born.

Google Wave essentially incorporates email, instant messaging, wikis, document collabroration, events, blogs, photos, and more all into one form of media called a wave.  A wave can contain any single or combination of the formentioned items and can be shared with any number of other people.  Multiple people can make changes to the wave at the same time, much in the same way that two people can edit the same Google Doc, simultaniously seeing eachothers settings in real-time.

This sounds great, right?  So how can it get better?  Well it does because Google Wave uses an open protocal called the Google Wave Federation Protocol making it possible for anyone to create their own Wave server that can communicate with other Google Wave servers world wide.  Google has also release a set of APIs that allow developers to collectively expand and build on the Google Wave Platform.

With everything that Google Wave is capable of doing both now and in the future as developers work on Google Wave based systems, it is possible that a 40-year old communication tool like email may have found its competition as Google Wave effectively handles email as well as many other Internet commication mediums from one interface.  Obviously this won’t take place over night, but I imagine over the next few years that Google Wave may become the Internet communication platform of the future.

I am including the keynote presentation that was given at Google I/O this year on Google Wave below.  I will warn you that it is 1 hour and 20 minutes in length, but if you can spare a few minutes to watch it you will be glad you did.