Do the Wave: Rasmussen Dishes on Google’s New Collaboration Tool

Google (News - Alert) is the most-watched company in communications. So when the company recently launched a beta test of a new collaboration tool called Google Wave, tongues started wagging. In a recent interview with INTERNET TELEPHONY, Lars Rasmussen, one of the Google Wave team leads and a software engineering manager at the search and online advertising giant, explained the thinking behind this new technology, how it relates to the open source movement and who’s doing what with it.

How did Google Wave come about?

Rasmussen: We started out with the observation that email, which is still the most popular way for people to communicate, is a 40-year-old technology that actually predates both wideband and the Internet, and it’s remarkable how successful it’s been. But it was really defined in the very early days of computing and primarily just to mimic snail mail.

We looked at how much computers have developed since then. They’re obviously a million times more powerful, and networks are a million times more powerful. And we thought ‘what if we tried to look at what computers can do today and try not to mimic an existing analog form of communication, but now just come up with what we thought was the best mechanism for communicating on computers.’ And that’s where Wave came from.

So what exactly is a Wave?

Rasmussen: The basic concept is really quite simple: a Wave is a shared object. Instead of users participating in a Wave -- and you can think of a Wave as being half way between a document and a conversation -- a Wave is a tree structure of messages. Each participant can add and remove messages; and they can edit existing messages. That’s really all there is to it. It sounds very, very simple, but it turns out that there is a very broad range of utility in these Waves.

We have this ridiculously long demo that we did at our developers’ conference back in May where we go through and show how this Wave object can be used to have conversations like you would in email, or on a bulletin board. And you can have conversations like you would on an instant messaging system. But because you can edit messages – even each other’s messages – you can use it to collaborate on content by editing it, even at the same time.

You can use it to put together photo albums. We have the extensibility mechanisms so that third parties can add types of content to it, from games to drawing surfaces. One of our favorite demos came from SAP (News - Alert) to build a business processing modeling tool on top of it.

How does Wave compare to other communications, collaboration and unified communications tools?

Rasmussen: With IM and email you have to choose at the start what mode of an action you want, but in a Wave you can switch back and forth in the same conversation based on whether the other person is online or not.

Also, instead of putting together all of the existing protocols so you can use [mediums like email and IM], we invented a new protocol – Wave federal protocol – which lets you do all the different types of communication in the same protocol so you don’t have to choose. If you have a system that lets you do email or IM in one space, typically you have a different set of tools based on whether you’re doing IM or email. But in Wave, because you can do both modes of interaction within the same tool you, have all of the features available [like spell checkers, for example] both when you’re doing synchronous communications like IM, and when you’re doing email asynchronous communications.

We find it very difficult to explain in words what Wave is. Not that we can’t explain it, but it’s not clear what the advantage is until you try it out.

How many folks are beta testing Google Wave, and who are they?

Rasmussen: We’ve sent out more than a million invitations, and there are several hundred thousand users actively testing it. People are using it productively. People who are using it are people who asked if they could be part of it, and then they nominated friends of theirs to take part in it as well. We’ve done some surveys and, not surprisingly, a high percentage of these users are techies themselves.

When do you expect to make Google Wave generally available?

Rasmussen: It’s a little hard to predict. I think during the first half of next year. We’ll keep expanding the numbers that are part of the beta or the preview. Then, hopefully around the middle of the year, we’ll be able to let anyone who wants it try it, including businesses.

We’re getting a lot of interest from businesses. It is a tool that tends to make people productive both in work and also when you’re just planning your personal life. There are actually several hundred businesses that are taking part in the preview.

What types of businesses?

Rasmussen: We have some sizable businesses that are piloting it now.

There are, for example, a couple of large news organizations that want to use Wave both in the production and the distribution of news.

One of the large Australian news organizations has a newsroom where a breaking item might appear on a screen and a couple journalists will quickly jump right on it and quickly make some phone calls and do some research and put together an article as soon as possible to get it up on their Website. And they don’t really have any good tools for this.

They could use Wave to collaborate and write the article. Then the editor could use Wave to make her comments and edits. And then the journalist [could use Wave] to fix it up according to the editor’s instructions. Once they’re done they could sent the result of their work to the Web designers, who could then put it up on the Website. So they’re building that now and testing it now, and we think it’s pretty exciting.

Tell us more about what SAP is doing around Google Wave.

Rasmussen: SAP has built several prototypes that are very exciting. They used Wave to build a business process modeling tool.

Before to design a business process you’d have one person sit and draw this process and produce a file that could be shared by email. By putting that file inside Wave it immediately becomes collaborative, so many people can sit at their computers and work in real time and work on the same business process. It’s a very attractive demo. I never thought I would consider a business process modeling tool to be exciting, but it’s really nice. And they’re actually out now piloting this with some of their large customers. A couple banks are trying it out. It’s still very early, but we think if this takes off that some really exciting things could come out of it.

How might one employ Google Wave for personal use?

Rasmussen: I wouldn’t dream of using what I now consider an old-fashioned tool like email to organize. I have a bunch family coming down for Christmas from Denmark and coordinating them all coming down and what planes they’re on and what they’re going to do while they’re here and who’s going to sleep in what bedroom and all that sort of thing is much, much easier done in Wave.

What is your go-to-market plan for Google Wave?

Rasmussen: Google Wave is similar to Gmail. It’s a cloud-based service, and you get it through your Web browser. The Wave of shared objects live in our data center.

We’re actively encouraging others to pick it up. It’s an open technology, and we’ve opened up all of the difficult algorithms. We’re in the process of even open sourcing our own code so that other organizations can build their own Wave systems. So just like in email, if you and I have email accounts from different providers we can still email with each other. Or, like the telephone, you can phone each other regardless of who your phone company is. We want Wave to be the same way. We consider that it will only really be successful when there are lots of Wave providers out there, and you can go and pick one based on speed, on price and whatever criteria.

What kind of other companies do you envision becoming Wave providers?

Rasmussen: For example, Novell (News - Alert). They have product coming up [in 2010] called Pulse, which they describe as an enterprise social network-type product. And they announced, and we’re working pretty hard with them, that they will support Wave. So when you’re inside Pulse (News - Alert) you can start a Wave inside Pulse using Novell technology.

If I’m a Google user, you can add me to that Wave, and we can Wave together even though you’re using Novell’s product and I’m using Google’s product.

Even though our Wave is within the cloud, other companies could build Waves even inside the firewall.

How does Google plan to monetize Wave?

Rasmussen: We have this great luxury at Google that we tend to worry about making things popular and usable first, and once we hit a certain critical mass of usage then we start thinking about money. Typically that’s when you know the right way to monetize anyway. Although with Wave we have a lot of ideas.

The most obvious is … you know the product Google Apps, it’s a bundle of applications – Gmail, Docs and Calendar. We’re going to add Wave to that. So if you’ve already bought Apps you’ll get Wave on top of that. We charge $50 per user per year for that. We hope that Wave will help drive the sale of Google Apps.

Another obvious thing, although we’re probably not going to do it anytime soon, is we’re obviously pretty good at targeting ads to content. That’s one of the ways that Gmail is being monetized, and we might do the same thing [with Wave].

We don’t know how it would work, and it’s not something we’ve designed, it’s just an observation we’re making. Google makes the lion’s share of its revenue from ads, so we have that technology, and it’s one of the avenues that we might investigate. IT

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