Prelude Interactive

I’m going to skip over most of the hoopla in the last month regarding Google Wave. I tried it, and I thought it was very neat. The reason I thought it was neat gets back to my roots as a relational database developer. Much of the power and possibility of these tools can be boiled down to the objects they embody and how those things relate.

This is a simplified “old” social networking model popularized by ICQ, AIM, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, etc. People know one another, and can exchange messages. Someone’s “wall” is the combination of messages that are sent from and to a person, depending on the network, but the basic model is the same. As cannot be overstated, the power is in the relationships.

Then Twitter came along. I began to notice around the same time that many services were sprouting up that were just like old, failed services but with features removed! How on earth could you attract users by taking things away? Well, in Twitter’s case, they removed the bidirectional restriction on relationships – now you can follow whomever you wish, and people only emit messages, they don’t have to specify a particular recipient. The real magic element was making it all public.

So what’s up with Google Wave? A lot of people are as excited and confused about it as we all were when Twitter came along. Google Wave makes a message the central element. Rather than being a time-stamped drone in lockstep with the previous and next messages in a conversation or wall, messages are now free to relate to one or more messages and people. I’m glossing over some of the details – the relationship might be embodied by the “wave” rather than the message, and you still need a LOT of UI sugar to make people swallow a weird paradigm like this. But, I just wanted to point out what I see as the real innovation at hand.