Google hoping Web surfers to ride Wave

Google is hatching a new species of e-mail and instant messaging, but the Internet search leader first wants the hybrid service to evolve even more with the help of independent computer programmers.

The free tool, called "Google Wave," runs in a Web browser and combines elements of e-mail, instant messaging, wikis and photo sharing in an effort to make online communication more dynamic. Google hopes Wave simplifies the way people collaborate on projects or exchange opinions about specific topics.

Google offered the first glimpse of its latest offering Thursday during the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's annual conference for software developers who build programs on top of its services. The rest of the Web-surfing public won't be able to hop on Google Wave until later in the year.

By the time Wave rolls out for everyone, Google hopes independent programmers will have found new ways to use the service.

Among other things, Google is counting on outsiders to figure out how to weave Wave into the popular Internet communications service Twitter, social networks like Facebook and existing Web-based e-mail services, said Lars Rasmussen, a Google engineering manager.

Rasmussen and his brother, Jens, helped build Google's online mapping service, which sprouted a variety of unforeseen uses after its 2005 debut because of the ingenuity of external programmers.

Having learned their lesson from the mapping experience, the Rasmussens wanted to give developers ample time to tinker with their newest creation before unleashing it on the rest of the world.

The Rasmussens broke away from Google's mapping service in 2006 to concentrate on building a service that would enable e-mail and instant messaging to embrace the Web's increasingly social nature. They contend e-mail hasn't changed that much since its invention during the 1960s.

Wave is designed to make it easier to converse over e-mail by providing tools to highlight particular parts of the written conversation. In instant messages, participants can see what everyone else is writing as they type, unless they choose a privacy control. Photos and other online applications known as "widgets" also can be transplanted into the service.

The service could easily accommodate advertising like Google's 5-year-old e-mail service already does, but Lars Rasmussen said it's still too early to predict how the company might profit from Wave.

Google wants developers to ride Wave

Google encouraged software developers to ride into the future of email with a project called "Wave," which opens inboxes to text, video, pictures, maps and even social network feeds.

"Wave" expands the capabilities of email to let people communicate and work together in real-time with text, photos, videos, maps, and more, according to Google software engineering manager Lars Rasmussen.

According to Rasmussen, "In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. You see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave."

A "wave" prototype built by a five-person team "holed up in a conference room in the Sydney office" for months was previewed at a Google developers conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

"After more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and our technology, we're very eager to return and see what the world might think," Rasmussen wrote.

A Wave software kit was provided to developers at the conference.

Wave allows for collaboration and communication by letting people send out pictures, messages, or videos that can be built on or modified as they stream from recipient to recipient.

Waves can be rewound to see how exchanges evolved, according to Google.

"Developers are going to see the potential of Google Wave as a platform; we hope they'll leap on it," said Wave engineer Adam Schuck.

"They'll be able to integrate it with existing systems they use today, or produce new tools that allow people to improve and manage their communications."

The computer code for Wave will be open source i.e developers are free to modify it as they wish.

"We're inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch," Rasmussen wrote.

No launch date for Wave has been specified. Rasmussen and his brother, Jens, founded an online mapping firm bought by Google in 2004. The brothers' technology went into Google's free Internet map service.

Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle said that while the Wave goal is feasible, building a central station for various online photo, video, text and social networking feeds presents complex challenges.

Such a project also calls for cooperation from an array of technology firms, some of them Google rivals, according to Enderle.

"You start throwing these complex things together and things start breaking," Enderle said. "And, Google has not shown an ability to drive the kind of collaboration it would take to make it happen."

Google Wave has solved "a bunch of stuff that has traditionally been very hard" such as real-time collaboration and hosted data, according to team engineer Casey Whitelaw.

"Developers won't have to think about all of that, they'll be able to just build their app and go," Whitelaw said in the interview.

"The primary ideas are that everything is live, and everything is editable."

The Wave team in Sydney held weekly "team huddles" that evolved to include theme songs, prizes, and one member's quest to "help us develop our chocolate palate beyond M&M" candies, according to Whitelaw.

"Rather than try to anticipate every possible use it will be put to, we've made it open and extensible so developers can come up with what they think is cool and useful," Whitelaw said of Wave.