Shannon Greywalker's Blog

Just a few days ago, on Thursday, May 28 at the Day 2 keynote address of Google I/O in San Franciso, Google made history with their 90-minute Google Wave Developer Preview session. Here is a link to the video of that presentation, and in my opinion it will be among the most valuable 90 minutes you can spend this year to watch this. I’ve never been a fanboy of Google and I personally use none of their tools and products so far except for their search engine and Google Maps, but Google Wave is just brilliant, spectacular, and groundbreaking.

Note that I said “Google made history” and not “Google made web history”. Google Wave is ultimately going to change the entire face of the emerging Social Web, so it affects every individual and organization that relies on social networking for their information sharing and marketing. Beyond the obvious impact on the Social Web, Google Wave is also going to change aspects of every business that currently relies on communication and collaboration tools of any sort, including the ubiquitous but lowly email. Finally, since this is a blog geared towards technical communicators and agile developers, Google Wave is ultimately going to change (and vastly improve) how every agile team works together and how technical writers collaborate with their subject matter experts, reviewers, and editors.

I’m tempted to say “just watch the video and you’ll see what I mean”, but I know some readers might need a little more convincing to spend 90 minutes watching a video about work-related stuff. Also, I don’t want to shock you by writing an article that is only two paragraphs long. ^.^

So why is Google Wave so historic? These are some of the impacts that occurred to me while watching the video:

• Waves are going to become the underlying format of every social networking site that wants to survive. Seriously. Even FaceBook will become irrelevant very soon if they don’t adopt Google Wave with open arms. The entire question of FaceBook Connect versus OpenSocial has just become moot. The question of Twitter versus FaceBook or MySpace versus FaceBook or anyone versus anyone else has just become moot. Google has figured out a way to “win” the entire battle for the Social Web in a way that doesn’t directly compete with any existing social network, yet makes Google the center of all social networks (that want to survive). The great part is that any social network that embraces Google Wave will become a much better social network. Google Wave will put an end to all the walled gardens. Any social networking site that wants to remain a walled garden will be left out in the cold and suffer a corresponding demise.

• Waves are eventually going to replace email as we know it. Microsoft Exchange/Outlook might be able to hold out the longest because they have the majority of the business market at present, but eventually even the people who work in non-technical industries are going to start doing end runs around their own email system and using one or more implementatons of Google Wave for their internal and external communication. If Microsoft is smart, they too will incorporate Google Wave into Outlook and HotMail, Yahoo! will incorporate Google Wave into Yahoo! Mail, and every other player in the email business will do likewise.

• Google Wave or some more focused/extended implementations based on the open source API is going to supplant (or provide significant new functionality within) pretty much every planning and collaboration tool you currently use for agile. When you watch the video demo link, pay attention to the segment that demos the “Polly” robot. Notice how similar that is to the basic flow of a task board? Some smart developers out there are going to create the perfect (and inexpensive) all-in-one agile support tool using Google Wave before too long. You can use Waves as the basic foundation for performing effective sprint planning, managing your task boards, automatically creating burndown charts from the state of tasks on the task boards, writing/estimating user stories (even integrating seamless “planning poker” functionality), and of course doing any manner of collaborative authoring in a way that prevents all the edit-locking issues of most wiki engines or older Web CMS engines and provides all the speedy real-time collaborative editing features of excellent tools like EtherPad.

• Google Wave will ultimately also change the tools that technical writers use, and the way that they collaborate with their subject matter experts, their reviewers and their editors. Most tool used by tech writers are currently siloed. You can’t afford to license people outside the information development department, and you probably don’t want anyone else tromping around in your source environment anyway. Collaborative authoring, especially in the high-bandwith mode required by tech writers in an agile shop, requires the painful process of doing your initial collaborative team authoring in a wiki or wiki-like Web CMS or proprietary knowledge management tools like Microsoft Sharepoint, and then manually copying the finished drafts from that external system into the system you use for publishing your information products. Even if you’ve devised a way to automate moving information between a wiki and your publishing environment (no commercial tool currently does this as a turnkey feature), there is still a fair amount of development time and ongoing overhead in the process. The smart tool vendors for tech writers will be making life easier for themselves and their customers by using the open API for Google Waves to incorporate Waves into their authoring/publishing tools sooner rather than later. The tool vendors that refuse to do this will suffer.

• Alternatively to the preceding bullet, some smart wiki engine developer or Web CMS developer will make the wiki/CMS that finally supplants the traditional tools used by tech writers. They will do this by making Waves an alternative core page/article type in their system, adding more extensive content tagging and/or styling options, adding some ditamap- or AuthorIT-style structures for reusing Waves in various “books”, and creating the push-button ability to take a “clean view” (all comments in the wave are hidden) of any Wave in the system and push (and link) it to a standard page/artcle in the wiki or CMS. End-users of the page/article wouldn’t be able to directly edit or comment in-line like you typically can with a Wave, but they could follow a link or page control to see a sanitized version of the original Wave that was used internally for authoring, and they could begin comment threads in that sanitized Wave to provide feedback. The possibilities for expanding the current core editing and publishing functionality of existing wiki and Web CMS engines is staggering. I could easily see a wiki or Web CMS that has embraced Google Waves being able to support the authoring and publishing needs of information development departments. Each Wave is just an XML file at its heart, so all you would need is to create some good canned XSLT-based system to output any required PDFs or Word documents or other downloadable/printable information products in addition to the online output of the wiki/CMS itself.

Excited yet? I sure am. I want someone to build the type of tool I described in the last bullet.