first impressions: Google Wave
OK, so I'm sure hundreds of thousands of other bloggers with more insightful comments than me will be posting about this, but I'll still put in a quick shot. Google Wave http://wave.google.com is creating a major buzz following a recent developer demo. The video makes it look pretty good, with the most significant emphasis on the real-time interaction and open extensibility.
Wave promises to re-define the paradigms of email, instant messaging, wiki and other collaboration models by incorporating them all in a unified protocol. The prototype client-side tools run entirely in the web browser but behave much more like a native desktop application. Conversations can occur in character-by-character real time, eliminating standard "Suzie is typing..." lag times. Documents can be edited collaboratively in real time with color-coded highlights as they are typed. Everything is re-play-able in a timeline so you can see how the work progressed.
I think there's a lot of potential here. Will Wave supersede all these other forms of communication? Hard to tell. There's certainly a lot of inertia to overcome, or at least accommodate. With the open APIs, it should be possible to integrate Wave technology and build interfaces to existing systems like SMTP and Jabber. I'll also be interested to hear more about how the new Wave protocol addresses things like trust relationships and spam prevention.
Regardless of whether it revolutionizes the world or not, I have to give props to the google team for taking a shot at innovating and changing the way we think about communication. It's also very commendable that they're pursuing this project with as much openness as they can, taking the extra step to allow interoperability and even direct competition in a way that still encourages connectedness across the entire system. Keep up the good work, guys.