Tonight, I decided to invest in the full 1h20m and watch the Google Wave demo video on YouTube. I tend to analyze and think about things at the meta-level, and at that level, overall, nothing in the demo was all too surprising. Here are my thoughts.
The Wave UI
Google is largely an engineering driven company. I think if it wasn’t for the hip Product Managers running around trying to keep up with the PhDs, their UIs would be composed of mainly command line interfaces with maybe some SOAP calls if you wanted to get fancy.
With that said, I thought the UI they pulled together for the demo, albeit a little clunky in certain parts, was by and large quite impressive. The first thought that came into my mind when I saw the UI was “holy shit, that’s what Rikk and that other crazy guy was trying to pull for Plaxo 3.0“
At the time, we just couldn’t make the damn thing fast enough, nor intuitive enough, and here it was, in all of it’s glory, with the strech and contract, working perfectly.
Was it that we had sucky engineers? Has the web really matured that much that they can finally managed to make this UI fly (and fast)? Is it just demo magic?
I think Google pulled it off because the Web has really matured… I’ll tell you why, but it connects more with the next section, the Wave’s architecture.
The Wave Architecture
I think the Wave is one of the first cases on the Internet where we are truly changing the trajectory in how we develop our systems and their architecture.
To put it in context with a maturity graph that we are familiar with, it’s like we’re finally moving away from coding our applications procedurally to a paradigm that is closer to object oriented. Furthermore, we’re finally moving away from the concept of a Request -> Reply, or a Ping -> Pong, or even a Poll -> Resulset, to a truly event driven system where each aspect of a page is operating semi-autonomously.
Congratulations Internet, in some twisted backwards yet forward way, you’ve finally caught up with best-practices of Enterprise Architecture.
I think the federated model that Google is proposing, and the architecture and framework that they are bringing to the table is truly exciting and will hopefully take us in a new direction in not only increasing developer productivity but also improving in our ability to develop truly rich and scalable internet applications that do no rely on sucky inaccessible frameworks (i.e. Flex or Flash).
Waves, the concept
The second part of the demo moved beyond the UI, and the architecture, and more to some theories around the application of this technology.
Now, I don’t know about you, but co-editing a document sounds like a utter disaster to me and beyond being amazing demo-candy, I can think of very few real world uses for it.
But even beyond that, I couldn’t help but think of that “3rd window” showing the content of the wave as being just one giant fucking iFrame throughout the whole demo. Here’s why:
When you look at technology over the past 10 years, especially internet technology and technology for solving real world problems and actually making people’s lives easier, us, as an industry, have pretty much failed!
I think with stuff like microformats and other such semantic markup, we were finally moving toward making data more accessible, open and meaningful. But with Waves, with this munging of all kinds of data, with free-form typing, just with this whole WAVE, I’m starting to fear that we’re once again regressing in our goal of making people’s lives better through technology instead of more complicated.
It is clear that with Google making APIs available and their encouragement to build widgets and integrations, the onus is on us to create meaningful technology. Let’s just say we’ll have to keep a close eye on things… are we truly improving our lives with “more” or just complicating it even more? Creating more jobs for low-end data workers to deal with shitty technology solutions munged together for the lack of a proper technology solution that reduces human involvement rather than increase it.
Still an amazing achievement
In case I haven’t made it clear, I think the Wave team, after about a year and change of work has produced something extraordinary and potentially game changing.
Lastly, as another meta-level thought, I wonder if Apple’s technology supporting the iPhone, iTunes and even their Web Offerings are just as fancy and forward thinking. Apple’s presentations always focus on the end-user experience, whereas Google focused much more on the infrastructure-level stuff. Just a thought, Apple, are you there? Want to provide something game changing to the developer community (through a federated model perhaps?)
