Surf Board 63

The wave. It paints a great image whether you are a surfer (real world, not web) or a football fanatic (you know, when everyone does the wave). The wave essentially forces you to participate, whether in a group or one on one. You wave and hopefully someone waves back. Today Google threw out their Wave at the I/O Conference in hopes of getting some developers waving back. And its unveiling has plenty of people talking about what this means for the evolution of online communication. So what is it?... Wave is basically a new Google service that allows users to combine email, IM, photo sharing and social networking into one seamless framework (and interface) integrating all the ways we mainly communicate online. In doing this, Wave has the potential to make us more efficient (or more distracted perhaps) by keeping all your comings and goings online together in one place. But its much more than this. Its a new way to think about how we communicate by blending together all the disparate communication tools and evolving it into something more. The service has a long way to go before its ready for public prime time (late 2009 release perhaps?). However, now that the APIs are going to be released to the developer public, Google has high hopes of getting feedback and more ideas of how to further develop the service. For a nice summary of Wave and what its all about, see this Cnet story. Incidentally, the folks who have given birth to Wave are the brothers Rasmussen (Lars and Jens) whose claim to fame is the creation of Google Maps, a service that was bought by Google thus bringing the Rasussens into the Google family.