So by now I thought the world would have caught up with this massive piece of news. It occurred two days ago and I am still having trouble finding any information about it.

Google smacked China. Basically what happened was Google became aware that it was under highly advanced and targeted attacks against its Gmail section. It was originating from inside China and going after the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Then they got serious and started digging. Finding that dozens of US, European and Chinese Gmail account for activists were being routinely accessed, not through Google’s breach but through each account holders breach. Add in to all this that the attack was not just on Google but on around 20 other large companies this is massive news.

With this Google has been sharing around the information it has gathered so far with other relevant parties.

The upshot of this? When Google first entered into China, opened up offices and started up Google.cn I was impressed. I have lived in China for a while and the greatest problem there, is not the corruption, the systemic caste system of communist party members and non-members. No the greatest problem is knowledge about the world and current events. opening up Google like this could only be a good thing… and then we found out that Google would filter the results. I can see their argument, opening up the internet is a great achievement and paying for it by censoring some results was a small price. however like the rest of the world China is hurriedly going ass-backwards on how the internet should work.

So now Google has flat out said “No, no more. We will not censor results for you. if you don’t like that then we will take our ball and go home.” effectively? Suck it China.

This is amazing, this is  wonderful and yet I can’t find much information or coverage on this. The ramifications are huge. If nothing else this should force a light onto China, if Google does pull out then everyone will sit up and pay attention.

As I said the greatest problem in China is the lack of world knowledge, so the greatest threat to the Chinese government is people waking up and paying attention.

About a month ago I got access to the early beta of Google Wave. I initially joined with a few friends and we started playing around with it. I then decided to write up a post of the experience.

So a month down the track has my opinion changed? Has the luster worn off? Kind of and yes. My opinion has not changed but my original take was a lot more generous and optimistic. Now that the novelty has faded and I have had the chance to look more critically at it the flaws.

Fundamentally what they are trying to achieve with Wave is admirable. I have not seen this attempted in such a scope before. This reimaging of how we communicate. Before all, digital forms of communication have been direct analogues of its physical counterpart. Instant Messaging is the phone and Email is the snail mail. Wave was a brand new way of doing things, of starting from the basis of technology and building from there.

Well there lies the problem I think. Email and IM work. Sure they have their flaws but the barrier to entry is so low and the use of them is so easy and convenient that changing the norm will be incredibly difficult.

Now to the flaws of Google Wave. It suffers from the old problem of Jack of all trades, master of none. You can use Wave as an IM platform, as an email like client, as a collaboration tool you can even use it as a rudimentary file transfer platform. However all the individual parts are weak and combined together does not improve it.

Instant Messaging. If I use an instant messaging client it is unobtrusive, small, light weight and responsive. I need to talk to someone then double click the icon in the system tray and then from the menu double click their name and away we go. It is discrete and easy to use, tracking our chat history if I want and still has drag and drop file transfer, also because chat platforms have become so open you can grab something like trillian which can patch into all the platforms so you can chat with anyone regardless of what software they use. With Google Wave I need to open a browser, login, start a new Wave and invite you. Now we can talk. Traditional IM takes ~2-3 seconds to start a conversation, Google Wave ~10-30 seconds.

Email. If I have a computer I will have my email client setup on it. There is no question there. Email has many, many problems ranging from the obvious, Spam, to trust, how do I know that DarthVader@hotmail.com is really the Dark Lord of the Sith? However as I said before the barrier to entry and ease of use is so low that almost everyone has access to email. For Google Wave if it was purely emailing your family and friends then it is almost comparable and in some cases much better. Wave’s track easier and turn them more into conversations you can follow instead of having to scroll through masses of text in an email. However what if I am emailing a business a question? Why do I need to add them as a contact to my Google account to add them to the Wave? Instead of email where you only need the address in Wave you need them added to your contact list. Yes Wave has some nicer features here for email like functions but email still remains easier and more palatable to use.

Collaboration. As a collaboration tool, again Google Wave has some fantastic ideas, the ability to replay Wave’s, for nested conversations and the simple drag and drop interface. For very small project’s I can see this being useful. However for serious collaboration project’s then an actual tool designed and written for this end is much more robust. Something like Sharepoint and even creating your own Wiki. When using Google Wave and the post count and the amount of people grew the Wave’s slowed down immensely. I understand it’s a beta but the amount of content created with even relatively simple projects is still an incredible amount I do not believe that a Wave could cope.

To sum up I like what they have tried to achieve and I believe the fundamental idea, this approaching communication from a digital background, is amazing. However I also think that the problems with Google Wave are built into the way it works so continuing down this path, trying to fix the symptoms as fixing the underlying problems is not possible.

Fixing Google Wave would require such a massive effort and a reworking and rewriting from the ground up that I think it would be simpler to view Wave as a first attempt; take what was learnt and start again.

Wave needs to be hosted in the cloud as it is now, accessible from a browser. It also needs a desktop component that synchronizes with the cloud so it can run like a common email client taking the load off the browser which at the moment simply cannot handle it. It also needs a third IM-like interface, say a mini version that would run in the system tray and would have a stripped down version that would still synchronize with the desktop client and the cloud. That would fix most of the issues I have with Google Wave.

What is a wave?

That is the question I was asking myself around 5 months ago when I caught wind of another of Google’s many projects. This one was shown during Google I/O this year. They were doing an hour long demonstration on a project they had called Google Wave. While watching I was intriued but was not blown away.

Fast forward four months and one of my friends dropped me an invititation to the closed Wave beta. Firing up Chrome and logging in I was presented with a very google like interface. Clean, crisp, uncluttered layout.  Down the left is the familair naviagtion panel, Inbox, Spam, Trash etc and continuing down is my contacts list. The rest of the screen is split into two equal windows, the left for all my Waves and the right panel to show the selected Wave.

So again I was left asking what is a Wave? I could have done my usual, go to google to do some searching. However 7 of my friends also got into the beta so straight away we just started playing around with it. trying to found out what it did, how to manipulate it, what are the shortcuts.

A wave is what you get when you take email, instant messaging (IM) roll them together and sprinkle some collaboration tools on top. An incredibly powerful system.

You can open a new wave and invite who you want to participate in it. If you only invite one other person it is more email, IM than anthing else. You can send each other messages (wavelets) within the wave, whole chunks of text, drag and drop pictures, drop in links etc. With more people it gets more interesting, the other tools come more into play. Private responses where you select who can view it, post polls up for everyone to take part in into the wave. Each message can be directly responded to so you can have many nested conversations that are easy to jump in and out of.

One of the more amazing abilities is, say me and three other people are working on a large proect. We have a Wave going, we have been using it for a while so there are nested conversations within conversations. Pictures, updates everywhere. now we add someone new. How can they understand whats going on? Simple, the replay tool. Click replay on a Wave and it runs the Wave for that person from the beginning showing each change in chronological order.

Even with that though it can get very confusing. You can see what everyone is typing while they are typing. You can jump in and edit anyone’s comments (it add’s you to their comment so no stealth comments). You can be typing and adding to a comment while someone is doing the same thing. it is all real time. So there is a real question of ettiqute. As we havent quite yet figured out email ettiqute getting used to Wave will be interesting.

It is still definately in beta though so there is a lot of time to fix and learn. Of course once my friends and I had been using it for an hour it was natural for one of us to open a new Wave entitled “So how do we break this thing?” Apparently posting a million character word breaks the Wave making it unusable for everyone in the Wave.

With all this will it surplant email or IM? The short answer is no. If you just want to fire off a quick question or message, email is still easier. Holding long conversations is still easier via IM (or the phone of course).

What it will do is collaboration. Anything that requires more than two peoples input it really shines. The ability for everyone to have their say, to follow easily what is going on, to track through the converation, to be able to jump in after an abcense and get up to speed straight away, it is perfect for that.