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If you don’t know, Google Wave is a new ambitious product from Google that is attempting to change the way we communicate electronically by making Email, IM, document editing, etc… all realtime and collaborative on a single page in the web browser.  There is an interesting and entertaining video out there that I recommend watching.

And as I watched I started to record notes that I was going to publish here, but a bunch has already been said and I’ve read so much of it, so, I thought I would just hi-light a couple of the more poignant comments that I’ve read in all the hype from the last week.

My initial gut reaction was, okay cool, Google re-invented Lotus Notes and moved it onto the web for realtime communication and Joe Gregorio addresses this technically with his thoughts in “Wave Protocol Thoughts”:

Now some people have commented that Wave reminds them of Lotus Notes, and I’m sure with a little thought you could extend that to Exchange and Groove. The difference is that the extension model with Wave is events over HTTP, which makes it language agnostic, a feature you get when you define things in terms of protocols. That is, as long as you can stand up an HTTP server and parse JSON, you can create robots for Wave, which is a huge leap forward compared to the extension models for Notes, Exchange and Groove…

And speaking of these extensions, the opportunities are endless with an API that allows you to not only write “robots” in either Java or Python but host your own server to federate data (a huge enterprise feature).  And I actually thought the most impressive part of the demo was showing off a couple robots:

• “Rosy” a robot that translates text in realtime as you write, and 
• A spellchecker which also considered context before offering corrections.

If this becomes successful in the enterprise there is potentially a very large market of paying customers that want and will need extensions in every discipline from logistics to finance to marketing to manufacturing and beyond, not to mention all the data conversion that will also be needed.

However enterprise adoption and enterprise extensions are still years away.  I think the major and more immediate takeaway from the demo is that it increases expectations in web development.  I personally don’t believe it is quite as large as say, the way Google Maps changed the web landscape, that was a game changer and I believe Wave is more like a logical next step and Nick Gall highlights this in “My 2¢ on Google Wave: WWW is a Unidirectional Web of Published Documents — Wave is a bidirectional Web of Instant Messages”:

Here are a couple of my major take aways:

1. The Wave client is a major proof of concept (or pilot project) for HTML5. If the wave client becomes a killer app, it will have a major (negative) impact on other RIA architectures.
2. The Wave protocol is a major proof of concept for the extended use of XMPP. It transforms it from a IM/Presence protocol to a general purpose bidirectional streaming protocol.
3. Whether or not the Wave client succeeds, Wave is undoubtedly going to have a major impact on how application designers approach web applications. The analogy would be that even if Google Maps had “failed” to become the dominant map site/service, it still had major impact on web app design.

There are many passionate opinions on whether Wave will succeed or fail; but one thing is for sure, Google is gently pushing the envelope and therefore developers are expanding their knowledge of HTML5, ES5 and XMPP.  And, whether Google Wave succeeds, I think is irrelevant, because Google has demonstrated a glimpse of the future and when pursued with new technologies, everyone wins.  In that regard, Google Wave is already a success.