I was very excited yesterday when I was sent my user name and password for a sandbox Google wave account in prep for a demo / briefing from the Google Wave team (thanks to Sara Jew-lim and fellow IDC'er Caroline Dangson for setting it up). Of course I had seen the announcement and re-watched the video a few times but I still wasn't sure exactly what wave "was" and of course what the experience would be. Face it, I'm a hands on guy when it comes to software, it never really clicks until I can use it to do whatever it's supposed to do. We had a very good discussion with the wave team (Jason Freidenfelds, Jens Rasmussen, and Lars Rasmussen) and had an opportunity to play around with wave among the group (is that called waving?).
So what is it? Well, at its simplest, wave is a designed for the web communication vehicle that spans or combines pieces of all current online communication tools like email, IM, wiki's, blogs, etc. What it's not is a new social network (it is social though, or maybe more precisely collaborative). Wave is more about group and personal productivity than about connecting. They hope, through extensions by in house and 3rd party developers, that wave will become much more though. Think of it as a central gateway to many of your other online tools, so that you would use wave but you could update anything else you choose to integrate to wave (everything from IM or email to Facebook or Twitter). Conceptually the wave team used the idea of conversation as a shared object as the basis for the design. You can, for example, work collaboratively with a colleague on a blog post online in real-time, each typing at the same time and even editing each other as you go (you can see what the other person is typing and each typing stream has the author's name tagged to it)...the end result could then be pushed directly to your blog. The entire session is editable later and saved so that you could replay it and see exactly what was done (not so useful for collaborative blog writing but very useful if you work on a group project and a group member missed the session). It's designed to be synchronous and asynchronous as well so it can be used in an IM-like way and in an email-like way. You can attach files and embedded things like pic's (image drop, which for now requires Google Gears but won't in the future) and maps as well. In a conversation the threads are visible to all the participants and they can reply in the thread. There is also the capability to have a private conversation in the middle of the group conversation. While the interaction is (or can be) real-time there is also a draft a reply feature in case you want to think about what you're saying before sharing to the whole group. The built-in spell checker is contextual (it would know that "Can I have some been soup" should be "bean") and works as you type, giving you a drop down of choices / suggestions when you're wrong.
We did ask about business model and no plans are finalized but they are looking at lots of options. The initial launch will be consumer focused but some of their Google Apps enterprise customers have asked about adding it (so the enterprise model could be an add on to Google Apps which currently costs $50 / user / year). The consumer model could be ad supported or possibly a freemium offering with the option to buy up to a no ad version. There is also the possibility that they may have an "Extensions Store", much like an Apple Apps Store, that would sell in house and 3rd party extensions with Google getting a cut of the revenue. The public beta opens the end of September, you can sign up here.
UPDATE: Feedback from the Google wave team: "we actually already have hundreds of thousands of people on the waitlist, and will be drawing from that existing list for the approximately 100,000 consumers we invite to preview Wave on September 30th. So we welcome new signups, but we won't get to them in that first round. Also, important to note it won't be a "beta" on Sept. 30th -- it'll be just an early preview, with plenty of warts. Not for the pain-intolerant."
