THE KONGQUEST

I just watched the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O and was completely blown away by future potential of this application. Google has rethought the way communication should be done and put it all into one neat little package.

The premise of a “wave” begins with a message that is the start of a dialog between one person and another or a group of people. From there it can transform into a number of things simultaneously. It can become a static back and forth conversation like email, a real time back and forth conversation like instant messaging, or a work in progress like a word document or presentation that can be presented as a whole thought in it’s final state.

The impact of having these options to transform mediums immediately and fluidly will decrease the chances of online miscommunication dramatically. Because you can have a conversation and pop in a comment in any position you want to call attention to or re-write any part of the message and be accountable for it in the conversation playback, accountability for correct informatin lies on all participants.

What I like most of this application as the “email and instant messager killer” is that the Wave can be taken as far as you want it to. Open a wave with a friend and just treat it like you do as email. That’s fine. Open a wave with someone who is currently online and talk in real time. That’s fine too. Take it to the next step in the conversation and brainstorm a trip idea and put some pictures into the email and you can transform that whole conversation into a travel itinerary or travel guide for a book, ready to be exported immediately with some of Googles tools in the Wave.

This is THE application that all the collaboration and web 3.0 and tech geeks have been talking about when they say the future of the internet is content streamed through different portals (RSS makes it so that we do not see the original websites built around blog content) and that information will be collaborated in real time instead of statically in silos all over the web. I am interested in seeing how the world takes on this new technology and runs with it. I hope it’ll reach mass appeal like the advent of email, instant messaging, blogging, and now tweeting and just replace all those older communication channels.