12/01/2009

How We Will Wave

Here's the question. I was watching this video:

... and I was captivated by the part where he says "this is probably only 3.5% of what Wave could do." The fact is the official Wave interface is just one front end to the engine - there are completely open APIs underneath Wave that we could all interface with in different ways - via blogs, IM, mobile, who knows. Think of how we used to use Twitter through web, and while many still do, others (like me) have taken off to advanced interfaces like TweetDeck or Seesmic.

So stretch your brain for a bit - the question might not be how are we gonna use Google Wave, but what will it enable?

  • Collaborative online newspapers
  • Student crowdsourced notes for a course
  • The first collaborative comic book
  • Owners' Manuals written by the owners, as they use the product
  • Community based support by Wave, rather than by message board or email

And think even further - if they get the media managment systems worked out, we could be mixing music via wave (like http://www.indabamusic.com/), or designing art via wave, or testing a beta product through Wave (while it's in beta!). The mind boggles.

(Big nod to the latest episode of This Week in Google, which provided some of these ideas and further sparked this concept for me!)