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SAN JOSE, Calif.
—
Google
hits a key milestone Wednesday for a product that the
search giant hopes will transform how people communicate
and collaborate online, and perhaps hook more users on
Google's
menu of Web-based services.
Google
Wave, which combines elements of e-mail, instant
messaging and social networking to allow groups of
people to collaborate on a task in real time, will be
previewed starting Wednesday to more than 100,000
developers and users who have signed up to try Wave and
give
Google
feedback on how well it works.
Developed
by a small engineering team led by
Lars and Jens Rasmussen
, the brothers who engineered Google Maps, the idea
behind Wave is to move toward a kind of universal in-box
— where e-mail, video, maps, photos, text messages and
even voice conversations can all become data objects to
be shared and manipulated in real time by a group
connected to a wave.
Wave is a
platform, which is a series of services, on top of which
developers can create applications that supplement it.
Google
has been working hard to engage outside software
developers to write applications that will run on Wave,
creating services that will lure users and provide a
potential source of revenue.
Executives
pumped up expectations when
Google
first revealed Wave at its annual developer conference
in the spring, using words like "magical" and
"unbelievable" to describe the impact they
said Wave could have on Internet communication.
Developers
such as Ribbit, a
Mountain View, Calif.
, startup bought last year by BT that bills itself as
"
Silicon Valley's
First Phone Company
," already have written applications for Wave that
Google
featured on its official blog Tuesday.
"If
you have an e-mail and an instant message and a voice
call, that can all be navigated in the same wave,"
Ted Griggs
, Ribbit's CEO, said in an interview. "It's no
longer e-mail is one container — and SMS (text
messaging) is one container — and all these things are
silos. Wave is breaking those silos down."
Wave
users running Ribbit's applications could, for example,
hold a telephone conference that would connect through
any kind of voice communication — a cell phone, a land
line or voice-over-Internet — and then store a
recording of the resulting conversation as an audio file
or transcribe the conversation into a text document
embedded in the Wave.
Another
application
Google
demonstrated on its blog Tuesday included a group of
friends in scattered locations using the online version
of the Lonely Planet guides to plan a trip to
Australia
through Wave, searching out attractions in
Melbourne
with
Google
maps, reading Lonely's Planet's description of those
places, messaging their thoughts with the rest of the
group, and collectively writing up a day-by-day
itinerary, within one wave.
Real-time
collaboration on the Web "is a natural
evolution" for how people use the Internet, said
Rony Zarom
, founder and CEO of Watchitoo, a startup that allows
people to view video and other Web content
simultaneously with their friends, and that plans to
soon offer video conferencing and real-time document
editing to companies and schools.
"It
started as e-mail being the major platform for
communication, moved on to instant messaging, and you
can see social networking taking those broad approaches
as the major communication platform. I think the next
trend is basically collaboration," Zarom said.
"I think more and more companies see that as the
next trend on the Internet."
Zarom
doesn't see the more complicated Wave replacing the
simplicity and clarity of e-mail, however, and for
Google
, there's another hitch.
Wave
won't run well on
Microsoft's
Internet Explorer, by far the most widely used Web
browser. Because Wave uses the newest HTML standard,
which has not yet been incorporated into
Microsoft's
browser, Internet Explorer users will first have to
install a "frame" — essentially a browser
within a browser — from
Google's
Chrome browser to use Wave.
Google
says Wave runs just fine on Apple's Safari 4 browser,
Mozilla Foundation's
new Firefox 3.5 browser, and of course, on its Chrome
browser. The Chrome frame,
Google
says, will be invisible to Internet Explorer users but
will greatly improve the performance of a
Microsoft
browser.
Microsoft
, however, is warning users not to install the Chrome
frame because of security concerns.
Other
critics also are warning of problems.
"The
overall effects of Chrome Frame are undesirable. I
predict positive results will not be enduring and — to
the extent it is adopted — Chrome Frame will end in
growing fragmentation and loss of control for most of
us, including Web developers,"
Mitchell Baker
, chairman of the
Mozilla Foundation
, wrote on his blog this week.
Others
have speculated that because Wave won't run on Internet
Explorer, it is a kind of a Trojan horse in
Google's
browser war with
Microsoft
— a backdoor play to switch people to Chrome. (
Microsoft
declined to comment on that scenario, and a
Google
spokesman denied it.)
But
Ronald Gruia
, an analyst who follows emerging telecom trends for
Frost & Sullivan
, said
Google's
play is probably much broader than getting people to try
its browser.
If Wave
helps introduce users to other
Google
software that resides online —
Google
docs competes with
Microsoft Office
products like Word and Excel, while
Google
calendar competes with
Microsoft's
Outlook — Gruia said it could indirectly bolster the
value of
Google's
advertising, the company's primary source of revenue.
"The
better
Google
can get to know you as a person, the more targeted their
advertising can become and the more they can charge for
it," Gruia said. "The more
Google
products you use, the stickier you are for
Google
, and the more they will also get to know about
you."
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WHAT IS
GOOGLE WAVE?
Google
bills its new communication software as one part
document and one part conversation. Friends or
colleagues can work simultaneously on a task —
planning a trip, charting a business strategy —
wrapping in multiple facets of the Web, including
e-mail, digital maps, video, photos and even voice
communication. A demonstration is available at
wave.google.com.
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