Effortless computing

If you haven’t watched the Google Wave Preview – do. It’s a breathtaking re-thinking of email, instant messaging, collaborative working and much more. It should reach us later this year and will be open-source so others can build applications around it.

The developers, led by the creator of Google Maps, have broken the barriers between various forms of internet communications – email, IM, web, filesharing, etc – and solved many of the frustrations of their current implementations.

In Wave, a wave is a tree-structure of communications that can branch into sub-conversations and shift effortlessly in form between documents, email, instant messages, images and files. (No doubt Google Voice will get a look-in in due course.)

You can add and remove people from various parts of the wave, to break off into private asides or to bring in new people (who can watch a playback of the wave to help them catch up).

You can embed a wave in a blog or web page allowing many others to interact with it just as your private circle of invited contacts would do.

And all this is real-time – you see people typing (unless they turn this off), so you aren’t stuck looking at today’s ‘Fred is still learning to type’ message in an instant messenger.

It appears to outstrip the venerable MS Word ‘tracking’ feature that lets teams collaborate on documents – now you can have conversations around edits and many can work on a document at once. MS Groove tries to do this, but it’s tricky to set up and use – Wave appears natural and effortless*.

This will segue neatly into Google Docs – the developers promise to take it into Google’s spreadsheet app and further.

And i’ve watched only a third of an 80 minute show… have a look and wonder!

*Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, bizarrely responded that Wave is too complex and anti-web. Our money’s on Google doing simplicity better than Microsoft – but you have to respect Ozzie, who invented Lotus Notes and Groove.