Here’s an amazing thought. Despite all the new stuff that technology and the Internet has brought us, the most popular thing we all use is email. And its forty years old.

Like surface mail, email has a message moving from writer to recipient. As soon its sent, you lose control.

Emails fly around just like letters. You mail one out, you get another, separate email back. Copy someone in and it becomes another one. And so it goes on. An unmanageable mess.

Well, Google wants to change all that with Wave. Wave creates “spaces” on the server. Everyone has a view of the same wave and collaborates with it. Simple.

So Wave offers single instance storage. Now that alone transforms our email experience. But Google has something more to give us. A lot more…

Email’s new Wave

Wave is a hosted environment and this is where the comparison with SharePoint begins. Users don’t need a local client, they simply open a browser.

SharePoint introduced to the Microsoft masses the idea of a centrally located repository that users where given access to. Wave takes this premise into an email scenario.

So there are no messages. You have Waves. You create a wave like an email and designate “recipients” who instead of being sent a message, are given access your wave. All viewed through a browser, on the Wave server.

The other parties then see in their wave session, as in Outlook, a highlighted item and just click to open the wave. There may be just one part they’re interested in, so they can just insert their comment at that point. That’s neat.

But unlike an email, a new message isn’t created each time a comment’s made, the original wave space is modified to include the new comment.

Simultaneously, this appears on the originator’s wave view and anyone else included in the collaboration, with each one able to do the same. Amazing.

Users can embed images and other elements straight into Wave, but currently this needs the Google Gears API, but Google has applied to have this added to the HTML standard.

This Google Developer Preview movie explains what’s behind Google Wave and shows the first live public demo. You can Click here to see it on YouTube.

API integration

Google Wave has its own API which can be embedded into web pages and even blogs to allow comments to appear in a Wave, again in real time. This means that the scope of a Wave can be broadened out infinitely wide into the social media community.

Now this could be seen as a little dangerous if people weren’t aware that the audience had been expanded in this way, so Wave shows a warning when this occurs.

More goodies in the Google Wave Shop

Google Wave is big on real time messaging. It incorporates an instant Messaging ability, but unlike the pauses during composition of other IM clients, Wave shows the message forming keystroke-by-keystroke, giving a more real-world feel. This can be turned off to work like a conventional IM client.

Introducing people into the Wave

Very often, cc’s come into a message flow late on. If they do, they usually have no idea of what’s been said before, often leading to confused and misinterpreted messages.

Wave incorporates a playback function. This allows the new collaborator to actually see the Wave begin and witness it unfold, played back as if in real time. That’s very clever.

Great, I’ll have it!

Well, no you can’t have it yet. Despite over two years in development, Wave isn’t ready for release by a long way and Google has taken the unusual step of showing us Wave early. And certainly, this could be just to stimulate interest in the wider Open Source community. But then again, could it be a move to steal Microsoft’s thunder?

Is the Exchange post office about to close?

I’ve written before that I believe Microsoft’s Jurassic period Exchange looks out of place on Microsoft’s product road map. Monolithic, impossible to manage properly and clumsy, it’s expensive to run and a total compliance nightmare.

Microsoft SharePoint could easily be tweaked to provide all the functionality of Exchange and its Active Directory Integration – something that Exchange didn’t even get until past version 5.5 in 2000 – already provides it with access to the Global Address Book (GAL). So could this be the reason for this early showing?

Certainly, if CIO’s where aware of a better, cheaper, more functional Cloud-based solution, then Microsoft would be totally wrong-footed a long time before they were ready to launch. And that could only be a good thing for Google.

Regardless of what Google’s reasons may be for showing this now, it gives us a glimpse of a very powerful collaborative environment that could change how we talk to each other. Oh, yes, the tide is definitely turning. Catch the Wave.