section of Google Wave Is the new Google Wave going to call time on Twitter just when that particular Web 2.0 property has become the app to have open on your desktop at all times? I think there's a strong possibility, but only if Google starts to make the much needed changes in its approach to new product marketing that will ensure future success. More on that in a minute.

Don't get me wrong though, I love Twitter as much as anyone, but I've really started to find the whole 140 character restriction thing a bind, even if that's pretty much the point of the exercise.

140 characters; about the same length as a search engine site meta description snippet. It's a great way of practising your Adwords and SEO skills, but it hardly amounts to a conversation, and that's the big problem. Twitter, and the deliberate string length limitation, are tailor made for the SMS/instant-messaging/text-speak-forum-comment mentality where a lot is said, most of it gossip and nothing in any particular detail.

Even those heavy Twitter users who aspire to marketing guru status tend to just post lifestyle comments of pretty limited interest mixed with direct links to their latest blog posts - hardly the cutting edge thinking you'd expect from them.

Overall, it's a pretty thin experience and one that I've quickly tired of - a bit like subsisting on a diet of nachos; tasty initially but you soon long for some real meat.

Enter Google Wave.

Google Wave isn't out in the wild yet, but it won't be long if past experience of Google product launches is anything to go by - they tend to leak out what seem to be early beta details and then do a surprise launch of the real thing in weeks rather than months. The polar opposite of just about every Microsoft product launch in the latest decade in fact. It's from the same team (the Where 2 Tech boys as were before they were googled up) who brought us Google Maps, so expectations have to be high.

A description of what the new app can do is best given by the team themselves:-

A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we're inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

As the early picture shows, Google Wave looks like a combo of just about every two-way screen-based conversation method anyone's ever used. It's massively immersive with the all important instant feedback element to keep any discussion rattling along. I can't wait to review the finished item, but... that all depends on whether Google is 'serious' this time. By going repeatedly open source with their new products Google are starting to adopt a stance of, "There you are, now YOU get on with it". They've looked at the likes of WordPress and the iPhone OS and seen all the secondary app building going on and thought, "We'll have some of that" without seemingly taking on board that both of those base applications are constantly being developed by the original producers to keep them current and relevant. Open source really only works when it's bottom up - top down product dumping is doomed to failure.

Which is a shame because Google Wave deserves to succeed - big time. Google still seem to think that the public have the warm and fuzzies for them when that went some time ago - Street View is having a hard time in a number of countries and book publishers still tend to view the company with hostility. Public trust for top down application development platforms disappeared with the woefully unfinished Microsoft .NET Framework. Google are going to have to put some real after market effort into this if it is to achieve its full potential.

On The Same Subject