I remember writing email to only to three other students in the CS lab and to the one other admin that I worked with as a student. It was not really reliable, because you had no idea when and if at all the person would actually get the message (”Did you get my email about…”) and there were hardy any people that would have an email address (that they knew of or had proper access to). The other cool thing at the time where SMS text messages. My first mobile phone subscription in Germany came with unlimited free SMS – no one thought that the service would be relevant or actually be able to generate substantial revenues and it came at almost no additional cost for the operators.

In the mean time the almost 40 year old email and 25 year old SMS have become the most widely used data applications world wide (read a great article on SMS and its user base and reach here).

Only in recent years we see the continuously increasing messaging traffic growing in other channels like instant messaging and online chats, collaboration platforms including wikis and forums, blogging and micro blogging and the cross syndication of those – even in larger corporations and enterprises (tell companies how to use Twitter at http://256.dk and get access to the data here at http://aleqz.com).

But each channel has more or less their own primary purpose and the very synchronous (IM, chat, etc) and very asynchronous (email, forums, wikis etc) ways of exchanging messages do not mix very well with the standard messaging clients today. As much as I always believed, that it was important to determine the most effective delivery mode since it directly impacts the level of interaction, micro blogging services like Twitter seem to prove me wrong or at least render the question irrelevant, as they seem to be able to address both – depending on how you use the service (and set up your client).

And even more “both” is in Google Wave. Google Wave is a soon to be open sourced framework for distributed messaging and collaboration platforms. It perfectly combines asynchronous email type messaging with instant messaging capabilities (both look extremely usable) and adds collaboration as content is not categorized as message, stream or document before selecting the sharing and editing metaphor.
The user experience is equally compelling like with Google Maps – no surprise with the two Rasmussen brothers on board of the Australian team. Drag and drop from the desktop, context sensitive action menus inside the content and concurrent live editing by multiple users are just a few highlights of what was shown at Google I/O.
Other features include wave history and playback of changes, Android and iPhone mobile browser support, versioning and version control, extensible content model to support more than just rich text content, embed API (as in maps: APIs make it happen) and plugin architecture. The chess game plugin definitely benefits from the history/playback feature but the spell checker, the link checker and the real time translation are genius tools already by them selves. Doodle will not like the Yes/No/Maybe plugin too much I assume.

Google Wave has only be announced an a small group of users is currently testing an early version. But if Google gets is half as right as they did with Maps, Google Waves is going to become the platform for most of the communication that is today distributed over hundreds of networks, platforms and technologies. What Facebook provided as the combination of micro blogging, picture gallery and exchange and address book is going to be available from a Google supported open source community with additional features and integrations.

Curious to see how the mobile and address book service for non internet devices is going to be addressed.

The product: wave.google.com
The platform: code.google.com/apis/wave
The protocol: www.waveprotocol.org