Google unveiled its new communication tool, Wave, this morning with a bang at Google I/O. The blogosphere is a buzz with talk of the new product, which blends email, instant messaging, collaboration and real time functionality into one platform. And Wave will open up its API soon to developers and will eventually be an open source product, letting the developer community take an active part in shaping the platform. We spoke to Wave’s creators yesterday, brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon. One question that’s is on everyone’s minds is whether Gmail and Google Apps become obsolete with the emergence of such powerful platform?
TechCrunch IT Editor Steve Gillmor caught up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who he also talked to about Chrome yesterday) after a Q&A session with Wave’s creators, and asked him about the future of Google Apps and more.
Brin says that Google has been using Wave internally for a couple of months and remained mum about how and when Gmail and Google Apps will be integrated. Brin points out, however; that developers of Chrome have been collaborating with Wave developers to make the platform extra speedy on the browser. Wave has also been working with the Google Web Toolkit, says Brin.
It’s apparent from the video that Brin is enthusiastic about Wave and its potential. Brin, who only works on a handful of Google’s products, handpicked Wave as a compelling project on which to focus his efforts.
Brin also says in the video that he didn’t know that Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, launched today but he did say that he has played around with Wolfram Alpha and is interested in exploring that search engine a little bit more (fun fact: Brin spent a summer interning for Stephen Wolfram).
WHy does Sergey have puffy eyes? Does he sleep? Is the thought of Google loosing out to a competitor the cause of this?
With all that money that just doesn’t look healthy.
Or maybe he had this interview a few mins after he woke up.
Talk about lame names. And you guys criticize ‘Bing’?
‘Wave’ is the equivalent of a bowl of luke warm water. Bleh….
The name may be so so, but the vision is truly remarkable … and Google is probably one of only 2 or 3 companies in the world that can pull this off and essentially create a new standard for interacting on the web.
After a long spell of nothing but twitter “innovation”, I am starting to get really excited once again about real innovation … Wolfram, Yauba, Kumo/Bing, Wave … and Apple still has not yeat really entered the consumer web space in a really big way … but using iTunes as a platform and the installed base on Iphone/Ipod/Mac fanatics, Apple could really do so.
What a great time to observe the next “wave” of innovation!
Yauba? really?
I can see how wolfram alpha and wave are innovative in that they’re taking a fundamentally different approach to something conventional.
Why is Yauba included in that list?
“Why is Yauba included in that list?”
Probably because of this:
“Our Internet privacy policy comes with no fine print, no footnotes, no caveats, no ifs, no ands, and no buts. The entirety of our privacy policy is as follows.
We do not keep any personally identifiable information.
Period.”
It’s certainly a debatable point whether the public cares about privacy to that degree. But for those that do, the contrast to, say, Google is stark.
More likely it’s because of his baby son. Babies do that to your sleep.
It’s a sign of kidney problems. Drinking too much liquid, staying up all night, etc.
Sergey just had a new baby a few months ago. Could that be the reason?
by engineers…. for engineers…
What will be interesting is when developers are able to innovate with the API. Microsoft’s Surface / Facebook API demo is an example! Those chain emails that are sent around the office are going to take on a whole new level now
Your link is broken… you forgot the “h” in http!
“ttp://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/”
All your Base are Belong to Us!
Killer idea- lure developers with candy words “open source” and then “own the space” and kill Facebook/twitter. I am afraid it may work just as well as .NET or Google Base initiatives however- so far, fortunately things have flourished bottom up, not top down in the internet (with the exception of Adobe Flash perhaps).
Damn youTube vid doesnt work :@
Must have been a temp thing.. works fine now
Youtube always works.
The concept is too difficult to grasp for the ordinary web user IMHO. Reading the comments here at TC not even the tech savvy dudes don’t get it.
so do they get it or not?
/double negatives FTL
It was a typo u douche.
My intent was to say the don’t get it.
Can’t you guys take a decent video clip???
For god’s sake a blog like yours with that readership, the video quality sucks, audio quality sucks… a bunch of highschool students can do better then that.\
Seriously guys its time to grow up invest $1k get some decent equipment tell your guys to be a bit more professional… but what you guys are delivering is simply garbage… come one do it and you’ll see your blog will grow…
Kind of mindboggling how common normal sense stuff you guys haven’t figured out yet. But this clip/recording is garbage…
/agree
How can you be 12 inches away from Brin in an exclusive interview and have ridiculously horrible audio???
Can someone tell Sergey that Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine as in Google search? As for “wave” it sounds interesting and I’m certainly curious to see it and would like to know if we get to ditch gmail and Google Apps.
WHy is about every other post about Google?
Funny, most people have been saying every other post was is about Twitter
Looks like something between chat and Docs, where you can build a text/media document together in real time. Possibly useful and, if so, a good tool for signing up more Google accounts.
I was at the wave session where Spelly was discussed.
It looks ok. I saw a lot of cool stuff at this conference.
Not really new technology though. Just royally old technology that was never really implemented right until now.
I think AppSpot and the GWT, or Google web toolkit will put a final nail in the Microsoft Visual Studio coffin. The eclipse plug in and framework are just as or more powerful than Visual Studio, and the Java compiling to Javascript certainly does look like it matches the Atlas stuff with C#
It almost looks like all the former Microsoft guys went to Google and recoded the entire Microsoft dev suite with open source.
I am super, SUPER happy I did not renew my MSDN Professional license last year. This is Exactly what happened to Borland a few years ago with Turbo C++ builder.
I was also at the Youtube Activity API session, and got a key piece of information. One of the developers, the speaker told me that YouTube has been using a modified version of ffmpeg in their transcoder pipeline and has been since the start of YouTube. I know for a fact that Castfire does the same.
I was almost sure it was not based on FOSS because the video quality transcoded is so much nicer than ffmpeg usually produces. But no, I was wrong, it’s just a modified ffmpeg in a large pipeline where videos uploaded are queued to be transcoded, then when they are they are updated in the DB and UI.
Another interesting thing was the AppCache, Google discussed that at length. I think that the abstracted HTML5 version through the Google API which does both Gears and HTML5 stores transparently is significant.
I will say that after coming here I think our new project, our high availability cluster, is going to be even better. This conference gave me lots of great ideas for making our product better.
I’m sharing my pictures from the event with you all.
Some of them any how.
http://picasawe...m/GoogleIO2009#
The last ones are from the party where Google gave us all free beer. Free beer is the best kind. All of Google’s FOSS implementations from their internal use of the Redhat kernel, to using ffmpeg but never redistributing their mods is like free beer.
But sometimes that is ok. Especially when it’s actual free beer. And free phones, and free Google Wave developer preview accounts. Over all this was a great conference.
Great concept, I think its a bit too advanced for the average consumer. The ability to process so many activities at once will be interesting to see whether or not it will work.
“Brin points out, however; that developers of Chrome have been collaborating with Wave developers to make the platform extra speedy on the browser.”
Nice… in the past we all complained how MSFT played unfairly by making its browser tied too deeply to all its other products. Now techcrunch (a major writer in tech at least) is all going exuberant without any criticism when GOOG is now planning to do the same with its products and browser.
Chrome is 100% Open Source, read it up.
How do you get “tied” from “speedy”?
Wave is like explaining to your grandmother how to play the dvd. It’s way too complex.
You don’t have to explain it to your grandma. She can just keep using it like email if she wants. From what I’ve seen, Wave scales incredibly well from basic users to sophisticated ones.
friendfeed value just went negative
twitter’s halved
This excitement happens during every google release.i dont think wave is gonna be good.
awesome interview Steve.
Wave is too complex for Joe The Plumber.
If Joe The Plumber can’t handle it, then FAIL will be there.
Looks like Wave will defeat not just its competitors but even take other Google apps by storm. Definitely Gmail will become obsolete after Wave.
I’m thinking along those lines; I think it’s also potentially comparable to Search in potential size and revenue.
Honestly Wave does look great. I’m dying to trying it out. I think the way it’s working out in my mind though is that Wave will be more of a business thing/extracurricular thing for me, and Facebook will be my personal network.
I was just wondering if anyone has come across some good benchmark tests comparing the AMD Phenom II (any of them) with the Core 2 from Intel. I really don’t need core i7 benchmarks because that is like oranges and apples.