I’ve just watched a video from Google IO 2009, where Lars and Jens, the guys who created everyone’s favorite map tool, Google Maps, have just unveiled Google Wave.
Now, I was very skeptical when they first started this app up…and beware, the demo is roughly and hour and twenty (1:20) minutes…however, for the hard core geeks out there, it’s worth the wait…I’ve cliped the most powerful moment of the demo up here, runs about three minutes.
Ok, so long story short, Wave is a new model for electronic text based conversation. These guys start the demo reminding everyone that email was invented 40 years ago…and using simple diagrams of how the information flows, set up the idea of Wave around the notion that the conversation is the object to focus on, rather than the person who started the conversation.
In this paradigm, the medium now becomes part of the message flow. Most impressively, the team shows off a real time text translator which has the ability to convert 40 languages on the fly. And the crowd of some 4,000 developers…enthusiastically responds. A nice geeky moment even on web video.
Wave could be the next killer app with an open source philosophy meant to drive innovation. The cloud based service will clearly allow people who grew up with email, instant messaging, and digital cameras to at the very least drop a couple of applications from their machines…certainly not Grandma’s email client…unless she’s been working at MIT…
Watching this clip gave me the kind of feeling I get when I watch a good episode of The West Wing or MadMen…these guys are connecting the dots on why technology isn’t simply the race to enslave something to do our chores for us…or to help make us money…but rather to advance the abilities of the human race to advance itself in the spirit of how Bill Hicks used to describe evolution…
[...] was one of those folks, I’m hoping to be included in that subset…anyway…I also posted about Lars and Jens keynote…and the potential impact of the [...]