Sunday, May 31, 2009

Good Bye Email... the Wave is coming

It had been while since I had been blown away by a new technology, and that's just what happened when I saw Google's Wave demo presentation. They've done it again, and that just makes me wonder when is someone going to step up to Google... but that's not the point of this post. The potential for Wave is just enormous. This is a technology that I truly believe can revolutionize the internet as we see it today. When I read comments from Wave developers saying "Wave is email if it was invented today", I smirked thinking "sure, whatever", basically disregarding it as just corporate propaganda. But after I saw the presentation... well, it is, in fact, email if it was invented today, and more.

The reason I think it has the potential to change the internet landscape is not just because it's awesome (and it is awesome!), but because Google has gone on and made the Wave technology an open standard. The way I see it, in a few years time, we won't be using the cumbersome email anymore, but rather something like Wave, which finally makes electronic correspondence the way it should be. But that's not all... the technology has the potential to improve so many aspects of internet social networking, and many other things. For example, blogs. Blogs have become one of the central media for news broadcasting on the internet. If you're like me, you read many blogs, and leave comments every now and then, when there's an item you're interested in. Sometimes the discussion of that items becomes involved so you keep coming back to that thread... maybe you have it set so that you get messages on your email when someone replies to your comments, or you just check the thread every now and then. But this is not the only item you're following, or the only blog you're reading. You know where I'm going with this... very soon, it becomes tedious to follow up with all the items in all the blogs you follow. Technologies like Google Reader help a little (for example, I 'star' items I want to keep an eye on), but only so much. But with something like Wave, now it is much easier to do all this. Imagine you visit a blog (which supports Wave technology) and after reading an item, you leave a comment. Now this could be automatically added as wave in your wave client... automatically! Then later on you can just use your Wave client to take a look at the items you're following, in all the different blogs, and check whether there has been an update to any... anyways the possibilities seem endless.

What can I say? I'm impressed. I can't wait for this technology to come out. Job well done for the folks at Google that came up with this. It's just freaking awesome! :-)

No comments: