Google IO day 2

Second day keynote was ok, but less thrilling than I thought it would be. Lars Rasmussen, who with his brother Jens created Google Maps, and product manager Stephanie Hannon. They presented Google Wave. Google Wave is a collaboration environment, integrating email, chat, collaboration, document management, and much more. The one cool thing about it is that it uses html5 - it's based on GWT - and everything you do is live. As the demo shows, two or more people editing an email or chat or blog see one anothers updates live on their screen. Also, a "wave" created in a blog can extend to your email or chat. You don't need to go back to the blog in order to keep participating in the blog discussion: the whole thing is wherever you want it to be.

Is this a major internet revolution? I don't think so. It certainly is a leap forward, but it's basically just ajax on steroids. Why is Wave so important to Google? Well, it takes a lot of the stuff you do online to the browser. No need to have any software running on your laptop or phone, you just run everything in the browser. The browser is where Google is, so taking things to the browser puts Google in a position to gain prevalence over Microsoft. Web apps don't really care what OS or browser you have. And Wave makes sure you won't use MS Office any more.

Wave is open source. Any developer can contribute - although I take it not just any developer will be capable of doing so. Also, it's easy to base your apps on Wave, which gives the app a lot of oomph at low development cost. We will see a lot of Wave like apps soon as the thing is fully released.

We all received - or will receive shortly - an account for the Wave demo environment, so if you want a quick demo, just let me know. Here is the Google Wave developer blog.