My friends and I have created a few waves and now that the novelty has worn off, I’m left with the question of where this fits?  Its not instant messaging, per say, and it is more collaborative, but I’ve found it frustrating (perhaps because of a lack of friends on Wave) to try and carry on a conversation with someone in Wave.

But, I recall being the same way with GMail when I first got access to its beta program.   Early on, I despised the conversation view I now love in GMail and I couldn’t understand why Google would launch a new chat – as if I needed another one.  But those things quickly became assets to the platform that Google was building.

Wave is largely a re-think platform.  It is exciting that it can be extended and built upon to bring new tools to the table.  The playback feature is a good one that allows for all the communication to happen on the server and be stored there.  It is a convergence for email and instant message.

What is great about the hosted message platform is it removes the need for transport – the biggest problem facing email today.  I think that moving forward, a hosted conversation may be a much better way of communicating, but at this point – its only hosted by a single provider.  The beauty of email is that everyone can host their own or outsource their email server.  And if one goes down, the rest of the system survives.  Its architecture is distinctly different than Wave.

But Wave offers the opportunity to define a secure and verified transport between Wave providers.  Google seems to be supporting this to become an open standard for the world to use – not a closed system which Google controls.

And while discussing transport, regulation has become a major issue facing email today.  From HIPPA to SOX, government regulation now dictates how information can be disseminated.  A newly architected platform over secure connections could provide a much needed alternative to the largely insecure email used today.

So there is a lot about the system which offers promise, but it is different animal all together.  I can see how this could converge into Google Docs and offer similar collaboration that word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents offer in that silo.    I can also see how this could neatly fit as a secure email replacement.  I’m interested to see what other think or envision for Wave.

1) Music – we’re a world accustomed to iTunes and buying our music online.  Where will that fit?  How will it — or simply will Chrome OS handle media files?

2) Video – Sure, like music, what about video playback?  YouTube is great, but there aren’t any video editing tools online as part of YouTube – you have to somehow capture and piece together your videos.   I’ve never encountered an online video editing software (yet…).

3) Gaming – Sure EA is making some of their games available online and it is generally accepted for game consoles to have online portals to download games – but how will Chrome OS accomplish this?  Will it shy away from this on its underpowered hardware ?

4) Photo editing  - Sure, Google has Picasa, but will it be packaged with Chrome OS?  It has Picasaweb, but its features are currently very limited and its space is also.

What else am I missing – I’m sure there is more…

It is a natural extension of the cloud platform that Google has been developing for years, and an evolutionary step for Google.  Until the introduction of Chrome, the browser, Google was largely at the mercy of third-party browser developers.   And while it shocked many that Google introduced their own browser, it made sense to control the main interface to their products and to be able to control that experience.  Apple has used the same, successful model in their business controlling the end to end of their user experience and its garned them a lot of success.

Google hails Chrome OS as a lighweight, open-source OS alternative.  Its key focuses are speed, security and simplicity.  Those three factors may put it well above the Windows learning curve, where viruses and malware are a major headache, speed is laughable (at least in the Vista releases) and the interface has grown disparate and confusing.

The product announcement indicates that the OS won’t be available until second half of 2010, and that may be its biggest hurdle.  That gives Microsoft and Apple a year to develop and beat Google to market with devices which fill this area.  And that is perhaps the biggest head-scratcher.  Linux is there and there are current windowing environments which could be leveraged to quickly move this project to market, so why take until 2010 and also why give this much pre-warning to your competitors?  Several reports I read yesterday hailed this as doomsday for Microsoft.  Time will tell.  Others said this won’t affect Apple, but that’s hard to believe too.  While Apple seems largely uninterested in netbooks – the inital target of Chrome OS, its hard not to think that this may apply to larger form factors.

I can’t help but think how similiar this really is to the old mainframe days and green-screen terminals.  All the processing is done back in a datacenter somewhere and just the screens are being piped to the user.  Everything is cyclical and here we go again.  I guess the big difference is that now processing is done on clusters of every-day hardware instead of multi-million dollar, monolitical machines.

Another byproduct of the announcement is the close working relationship of Apple and Google.  Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, even sits on Apple’s board of directors.  It is hard to see who this isn’t and won’t become an even bigger conflict of interest for him.  I think his days on the board are probably numbered.  And as smart as it was to include some killer Google apps in iPhone form, the decision to keep Microsoft compatibility and even Yahoo (hey, the got push email) in the iPhone looks smarter and smarter on Apple’s part.

Consumers are the clear winner from this, however.  Google has a long history for creating great, free software and supporting it with ad revenue driven by its core search service.  With that business model, the OS will likely not be much more than a browser and maybe a couple other applications and the web being the star of this show.   This is a clear departure from Windows, Mac OS X and even Linux desktop OS’es of today.  The timing is good too, with the advent and popularity of netbooks.  Telecoms are looking to bundle their internet service with netbooks and push the same subsidized hardware/internet service combination we’re accustomed to with our cell phones.

That’s not to say Chrome OS won’t face some problems.   Apple tried a similar approach when launching the initial iPhone.  One year later, they back-peddled and introduced native apps because customers were unhappy with the Internet only applications currently available.  They longed for the offline and native speed interactivity of applications.  But a netbook is a different form-factor than a phone, so it may work better for this type of device.

Even though Google is now taking control over its destiny in regards to the terminal used to access its services, its now going to be at the disposal of the network provided with these netbooks.  Sure, WIFI connections will be speedy, but Google will face similiar problems with wireless internet via cell networks that Apple and other hardware vendors face.  And, mobile internet isn’t fully baked in my opinion.  There are still lots of areas without service throughout the country and places where the service available is doggedly slow.  Its an adequate trade off in an emerging market – the mobile internet service will eventually get better.

When Google Gears first appeared, I asked myself, why’d anybody want that?  What does it buy you?  See, I can’t imagine the world without Internet – its always close by for me, but not everyone is that way.  I can’t say I really understood fully until this weekend.  My wife and I have been discussing building a house and so all our spreadsheets with potential scenarios are in Google Docs, so we can share (talk about its killer feature, right?).  Well, sharing is great, but we hadn’t had time to talk about some of the scenarios I’d put together.  See, I am the geeky numbers one in the family and my wife confessed she really didn’t understand what she was looking at…  So, we had an hour’s car ride Saturday while traveling to go see the circus with our daughter.  Enter Gears.  

I enabled Gears in Firefox on the Mac, let it download my documents (which it did quickly…)  and off we went.  With no Internet connection anywhere in sight, we were able to pull up and make changes to the spreadsheets that were created online and really use them as if we had internet backing it the entire trip.  It was great.  And, on top of that, when we were back online, the changes sync’d and all was online too.  Very very cool.  

What Google has managed to do is really create a wonderful Microsoft Works replacement online.  Granted, its not as full featured as Office, but its got more than enough features for the everyday home user.  And the ability to take it offline (for someone on dial-up — like my parents) or someone traveling, is huge.  And think of this, the update to the latest, greatest isn’t a $49.99 or $199.99 CD away, its a quick internet connection away.  The download is much faster than any comparable ‘compiled’ software package. 

But I also mentioned Gmail, right?  Several years ago, I left a not-to-be-named ISP which resembles a Loony Tunes character to become a company man, subscribing to my new employer’s internet service.   My biggest pain was switching my primary email which I’d used for many many years over to a new account.  I chose GMail.  I had had my GMail account for a while at this point and it was sitting there pretty idle.  It was cool and it was Google, but it didn’t get much use.  That changed.  I switched all my online accounts over and slowly but surely, it became my primary personal account. 

Up until about last November, I kept Apple Mail as my primary email client.  I left it open at home and used GMail’s wonderful IMAP implementation to keep my two mailboxes sync’d.  But, there were times that Apple Mail didn’t play nice and messages might still be showing new at home that I’d ready earlier in the day at work.  So, I slowly stopped opening Mail, because it’d gotten too painful to wait for the initial sync when I got home.  Instead, I’ve found myself relying on GMail’s excellent web interface for everything.

I’ve gotten GMail setup to check my other POP accounts, bring those in and label them accordingly.  I can send “from” them as well, which is nice.  And really, GMail’s web interface is as strong as a desktop app at this point, and there are tons of features that a desktop app doesn’t have – including chat, tasks, SMS from chat, Twitter via the TwitterGadget, etc.  

So, I’ve enabled Google Gears and offline access for Gmail at home too.  I think its a much better solution for my laptop and for the times when Internet isn’t right there with me.   I’m interested to try this over my s-l-o-w EDGE data plan and see how well the sync works now that Gmail doesn’t need to download the entire Javascript application.  I’m looking forward to my next time traveling.