Bit late on writing this up, but later in the day I’ll write up what kept me busy yesterday.
Day two was really all about Google Wave for me. I think it’s quite revolutionary and watching the keynote I felt I was watching something that could have profound implications for communication and collaboration, both in the wider web and in particular within organisations. Oh and it has a nice clever logo which just made me smile.
It’s not just an e-mail replacement or a communication tool in my opinion, it’s more of a source/change control system for conversations and content. You could see it forming a significant part of workflows on one hand, with the collaborative document editing which strike me as a mashup of git/github and subethaedit. By adding groups/people to documents you’re inviting collaboration without having to leave the discovery environment and by embedding waves onto webpages you’re bringing the conversations happening around your content right into the inboxes of your organisations. It will require a lot of discipline and active listening within organisations because now what they effectively have is a hard link between them and their fans/unfans mediated through the original content wave… you can almost see the direct ties between the audience/content creators inbox.
The concept of a wave (which can be embedded) containing embedded objects and gadgets is particularly appealing with all of the state of those embedded objects being contained within the wave. Immediately I started thinking about waves on The Guardian’s datablog/science articles within publications where you could embed the data and visualisations and people could explore and remix with a state tree in the background allowing you to playback the route between the original object and the current version being accessible. Waves containing waves is possible too. It actually makes your head hurt a bit thinking about the possibilities.
Mashable has done a great write up, as have O’Reilly and Techcrunch. I’ll try and assemble the live tweeting I did during the keynote (apologies for over Waving that morning) some point soon. In the meanwhile it’s well worth checking out the keynote video and looking at the code samples/docs. In particular the Initech wave client designed by Milton is just genius… full of the humour of the film (I’m loving the fact that the Initech logo is even on a diagram on the Wave Protocol site).
On and it is full of APIs and Open, just like you’d want it to be so it doesn’t become a walled garden of fail. It’s really interesting and full of potential when you play with it too…
