Code Away

Some may say that it is too late to blog about Google Wave. The applause which started on May 28 can still be heard and the Internet community has done everything but go down on their knees and bow to the awesome concept.

For those who couldn’t manage time to watch the Wave preview, here are just some of the things it does :

• Acts like email when the recipient is offline
• Acts like a realtime chat when the recipient is online
• Maintains a common structure in one place (visible to, and editable by all concerned parties) instead of having copies in every person’s account
• Allows you to add other recipients to a subset of a Wave or the whole Wave.The new folks can “Playback” how messages were exchanged
• Allows visual plugins which can take the form of games, polls, etc. For example, instead of sending messages to each other, you can send Chess Moves which the plugin happily records and the game proceeds
• Allows realtime collaboration on documents with changes tracked. Again, a common copy of document is maintained.

While some skeptical glances are surely cast as to whether people will “embrace” this new concept of communication (as they are still stuck to SNDMSG program and have not been able to comprehend any other way to communicate all these years), the overall mood is that of joy, on having seen something truly profound, and having been promised that this will be available to everyone, for FREE, later this year.

The most obvious thing that hit me while seeing the preview was the way Google relentlessly pursues its mission. Remember Google’s Mission statement?

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

This is the way Google earns money: By targeting advertisements suited to your interests. How does it understand your interests? By organizing information about you.

So while the mission is technically about helping the world, it is also a lot about making profit. Of course, there is nothing wrong whatsoever in making profit by developing something which provides value to the user. Microsoft earns by asking users to buy the product, Google earns by providing relevant advertisements.

Thus started the long journey of organizing the world’s information. First they gathered some trends of what we search based on cookie information. GMail was the next big boost as a lot of personal emails meant a lot of personal information. Orkut, Blogger, Google Talk, Docs, Sites, Reader, Youtube; each product added to its suite targets nothing but collection of information from users in exchange for some great services, for free.

Yet, Google would still require to organize bits of information from different applications to understand the “complete picture”. Google Wave, in a lot of ways, has removed that additional effort.

Wave is a communication structure that can be used anywhere. (Potentially) integrated throughout Google Applications and beyond, it provides a single point of communication. Email, chat, organization of albums, blogging, collaborating on documents, everything is either available in the Wave structure or can be derived out of it (by creating a new Wave and importing some specific elements). So now, Google does not need to  organize information about you. You yourself will organize it all using Wave. It is safe to assume that information which might have been dispersed around on a dozen different websites online (Google or others) will now be collected in a common Wave. With little or no effort, your whole life (henceforth) is likely to be captured in a handful of waves. I shudder just thinking of the advertising avenues that follow.

Google, you evil genius, you!