Let's Have a Cloudversation

The buzz around tech websites today is all about Google Wave. (Microsoft's Bing Search Engine is getting some play too, but it's Microsoft, so people aren't trusting it yet.)

What's Google Wave? This is the Google blog's description:

In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As I wrote just yesterday, this is further evidence that the scramble to dominate all forms of web communication is not neat and clean -- everyone seems to be fighting on everyone else's turf. Google seems to have understood the challenge that Facebook and Twitter posed, and are taking some of the Twitbook turf with Google Wave.

Personally, I like the idea of creating a few different waves and being able to use them all for different purposes. It makes the jumble of communications neat and clean. And you can pull whatever information you want into a particular wave. If you want a wave of just your Twitter feed, you can do that. If you want a wave that imports comments to your blog, you can pull that in, check it occasionally, and write back. If you want a wave that just consists of funny links sent to you by the five people you know with the best taste in funny links, you can do that as well. Perhaps most importantly, you can edit a document within a wave, a capability that will be very useful in business settings.

I also like the backstory of how Google's developers thought of Google Wave:

Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point, and I was immediately sold. (Jens insists it took him hours to convince me, but I like my version better.)

Another way to look at this is that the web allows all sorts of conversations/information sharing to take place. There are one way conversations (websites), one-way, semi-intimate conversations (a blog with no comments), semi-one-way, semi-intimate conversations (blog with comments), large-scale, multi-way, non-intimate conversations (Twitter), large scale, multi-way, semi-intimate conversations (Facebook), small-scale, multi-way, intimate, non-collabortive conversations (private chat rooms), small-scale, multi-way, intimate, collabortive conversations (collaborative editing) and small-scale, two-way, intimate conversations (instant messenging). Each of these might be referred to as cloudversations, or collectively, as your cloudversation.

Right now, the cloudversation is a confusing jumble, because each part has been invented independently, with its own platform. Transfering from one platform to another, communicating from one platform to another and organizing content across these platforms is the challenge that Google undertakes with Google Wave. The mission of Google is to organize the world's information. A big part of that is organizing the world's cloudversation.

Here's a video from Google trying to explain the technical aspects of the document collaboration tools:

While this concept is difficult for me to totally grasp in the abstract, I'm excited for the public launch of this product. Anything that promises to clean up and compartmentalize our communication while enabling more of it is going to be a highly successful product.