So I have watched the Google Wave introduction video and demo. You should too. If Google is successful at building, attracting developers to, and deploying this system, it very well might be the next HTTP. Web servers, domain names and all the other cargo of the Internet might just up and float away.
Now Google is capable of accomplishing this. They might also manage to screw it up. Google Wave is such a large venture, I doubt seriously if anyone will be able to predict success or failure. However, Google Wave is so important that to ignore it might just be fatal to an Internet business. That’s something to think about.
When hypertext systems were still little demos with papers in ACM journals, some of the features shown by Wave were present. But when Tim Berners-Lee simplified the idea of hypertext down to a file based, distributed and open standard, discussions of other hypertext systems were over. So Google is retracing some steps here with Wave. But they are doing it with modern aesthetics, open source, open standards, and an enormous war chest.
Lars and Jens Rasmussen haven’t ignored what worked about the first web, but have created something entirely new using the same principles of openness and interoperability. This might really be Web 2.0. If successful, Google Wave promises to make the web even more personal and human centered. As for the big businesses on the web today, I wonder who will survive this monster upgrade tsunami?
