Tonight, while watching Charlie run around the dog park, another owner (dog dada) mentioned Google Wave.  I shared his enthusiasm and we both expressed our interest in receiving an invitation to it!

An invitation? That’s because Google Wave is not released yet.  It’s still in “Preview” mode.

This makes it great fodder for blogging- mystery, suspense, intrigue, drama, and technology!  But don’t let your guard down:

Google Wave is as much a new tool as it is a new way of thinking about old problems.

Do I have your attention now?  Good!  Confused? Even better!  You won’t be by the time you’re through reading this article.

Let me start by answering the #1 question (Sourced: Google):

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

To sum up an extremely flexible and versatile concept into a few words is somewhat of a challenge.  I’m sure Google spent hours agonizing over their current tag line:

Real Time Communication and Collaboration.

It’s important to keep in mind it’s a platform more than a single program.  What this means to you is that while the immediate uses of Wave are similiar to a combination of email and instant messaging, the long term implications are still widely undeveloped.  The platform has been created to be very open and flexible, so that programmers (they like to be called developers these days) can build all sorts of integrated programs (called Robots and Gadgets) into Wave.

Right now it’s a dynamic way to communicate and share.  It’s real time and has quite a few features (such as voting) that remind me of current collaboration tools like Confluence.

There are two videos I like that discuss Wave further:

• Really cool video by Epipheo.
• Google Wave Announcement (by Google itself)

This is a topic that we’ll be \/\/atching closely to see what it evolves into!

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

I want to share with you a video of an interview with Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.  It’s a fascinating look at what the Web will look like in 5 years.

One particular point he makes drives home the point of this blog:

“One of the things that people forget is that the rate at which information is growing is faster than anything else. So we’re like always drowning in information.  And that’s why you never feel like you never get ahead.  You finally understand this model or that model and there’s another one… Most people’s information will be gotten from other information as opposed to from traditional sources.  You tend to listen to other people more than anything else.”

As soon as you learn one thing, there’s another, and another.  I think we can all relate to this- drowing is a great metaphor, especially for us Web Waterskiers.  The concept of contiual learning is never more important than with the Internet.

I’ve found a way to ride the information, and sharing it with you is why we’re all here.