The Real Meaning Of Google Wave

Google Wave, the Internet giant's new online collaboration tool, is making, well, lots of waves. Google Wave lets users work on the same content object, dubbed a "wave," which can house both text and multimedia. Users can reply to messages and edit together in real-time.

The question asked to Tom Mornini :

Media : You've said that the long-term impact of Google Wave is probably underestimated. Why?

Tom Mornini: The problem is that people think of Google Wave in terms of the demo video, which does a great job of showing how Wave could achieve the next step beyond current tools for e-mail, which is used in some ineffective ways. The concept of e-mailing around attachments just makes me want to throw up, because it is inefficient and so error prone. It leads to multiple versions with no way to know the message-by-message evolution of the thinking that led to the current draft. The demo showed a better way based on Wave, but most people stop there and think Wave is that application. It's not. Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation.

Media : What did you like about the demo?

Tom Mornini: What the Wave demo showed is support for a continuum from the shortest messages to longer and longer forms of content. All of it can be shared with precise control, tagged, searched. The version history is kept. No more mailing around a document. This takes the beauty of e-mail and wikis and extends it in a more flexible way to a much larger audience.

It is all based on components called Wavelets that are documents that exist in a single version, which is kept current on distributed servers. So if I add a comment or the first entry in an e-mail-like communication, my server has a copy and so does everybody else's server. And then anybody who changes or updates those Wavelets specifically creates new versions of them, and all of the old history is maintained. And that's where they show that very impressive playback capability where you can see the very first message once you're added into a communication and see how the conversation progressed.

Media : Why is the playback facility so important?

Tom Mornini: As a CTO of a growing company, when certain e-mails finally bubble up to my level, it is not uncommon for 20 people to have been involved. Then I have to start at the bottom and read up to make sure you know all the history--that is how the issue started and was analyzed. If the e-mail was a Wavelet, I could playback that conversation from the beginning and see how the analysis developed and who said what.

Media : So, if Wave is not just the demo application, what is it?

Tom Mornini: Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary.

The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes.

But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.

Media : What's an example of new things that will be possible?

Tom Mornini: Any Wavelet can be assigned to services that act upon it. In the video they show, they can add a spell checker as a service that gets every update to the document so it knows when to re-check it. So people can build additional functionality and sell it in a secured fashion by only accepting Wavelets from clients. This solves a huge problem in the world of how to incorporate third-party services in an application.

The hierarchical security also allows many interesting things to happen safely. Let's say we're on a worldwide mailing list of a million people on this Wave, and you and I want to have a little side conversation. At any point in the tree you can set that only Dan and Tom have access to this document, or this sub-hierarchy. And in doing so, by definition, the rest of that tree is only replicated between those people's Wave servers so that we can have an entirely private conversation within the context of a Wave that we can both share, but you and I are the only people who ever have any chance of knowing that it happened.

The world will be shocked at how many applications will be built there.

Media : Is it interesting to you that the concept of presence, that is, the idea of whether someone is online or not was not emphasized in the demo?

Tom Mornini: In any of the Wave stuff that I've looked at, I don't believe presence has been mentioned. It wasn't part of the demo and I didn't see anything in the white papers I read. I don't think they're planning on that being a big part of it, but I could be wrong. But clearly, it seems that you might want to know if someone was available to communicate with. If I knew you were there, it's not difficult for an application to start up a Wave between you and I, and I can just start typing and if you start responding then we're done. If you are not there, then I send it like a traditional e-mail, which doesn't even really require a send. I just create the document and make sure it is available to you.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

But the demo video for Google ( GOOG - news - people ) Wave doesn't capture the importance of the tool as a disruptive and innovative development platform. Tom Mornini, chief technology officer and founder of Engine Yard, a company that offers an integrated software stack for Ruby developers, discusses the real meaning of Google Wave. check it down for the video ...

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Google Is Getting "Smarter" !!

Google is developing a new product to let people see, in detail, how much electricity they're consuming in their homes--knowledge that should incite many to cut back on their power use, the company says.

Google -the latest high-tech company to jump on the "smart grid" bandwagon--is testing the software product internally with about 30 people and hopes to expand it to more than 200 employees in the next few weeks. Later this year, Google plans to conduct pilot projects outside the company.

The Mountain View, Calif., Internet giant says it is partnering with a host of electric utilities, device makers, regulators and other technology companies to deliver the data to consumers.

One of those partners is presumably Silver Spring Networks, a Silicon Valley company making technology to upgrade the nation's electric grid. Google confirmed Monday that it had made an investment in Silver Spring but declined to provide details. A spokeswoman for Silver Spring also declined to comment.

Other high-tech behemoths, including IBM and Cisco, also are angling to provide technology to improve the aging grid. Right now, the system is old-fashioned and, in many ways, dumb. Utilities can't get much current information about things like outages and power spikes, and most consumers have no idea how much it costs them to use power at certain times of the day.

Google's product, called PowerMeter, is a piece of software that people can view online to see how much electricity they're using every time they run the dryer at 6 p.m. or leave an appliance on overnight.

Google doesn't have concrete plans for how to make money from PowerMeter, but it is yet another product that could drive more Web traffic to the Google site, said Kirsten Olsen Cahill, a program manager with Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm. The coding for the product will also be shared freely, so outside coders can write new applications for PowerMeter.

If 5.3 million people used the new tool and cut back their electricity consumption by 10%, they would save the equivalent of a gigawatt of power--enough to power a large city, Cahill added.

The electricity-monitoring project is also consistent with Google's goal of organizing all the world's information, Cahill said. Getting it to work, of course, will require aligning the interests of government, utilities and manufacturers of things like sensors for electricity meters. That is even before consumers start using it.

Google.org carries out several such "ecosystem" ventures. Its "Predict and Prevent" project, for example, is a disease-eradication program involving health ministries, international agencies and private sector drug and health equipment companies. Closer to the metering project's goal of reducing energy use, Google.org is active in a project it calls "REC," with a stated goal of producing renewable energy for less than the cost of carbon fuels. The organization has made investments in both wind and geothermal energy equipment companies.

Google.org receives 1% of Google's profits and equity, as well as the working time of many Google engineers. They were among the initial 30 individuals to test the iGoogle electricity gadget.

In addition to improving the world with PowerMeter, Google also might soften criticisms of its own dramatic energy use. Computer servers now account for over 2% of total U.S. energy demand. Google, which uses enormous amounts of energy to power its data centers, locates those parts of the business in areas like Washington's Columbia River hydroelectric grid, where juice is cheap. Google has reportedly sought exemption from sales tax on electricity use.

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Google's Top Expectations

The rotten economy may have broken Google's string of sequential sales gains, but the search giant's shares surged more than 5% in after-hours trading Thursday thanks to stronger than expected first quarter earnings and year-over-year sales gains.

Google ( GOOG - news - people ) also announced that its longtime sales chief, Omid Kordestani, will be moving to the position of senior advisor to the office of the chief executive and founder. Kordestani will be replaced by Nikesh Arora, now president of international operations, as president of global sales operations and business development.

The moves come after Tim Armstrong, Google's North America sales chief, jumped ship to take the CEO slot at struggling portal AOL in March. Since then Google has laid off 200 employees in its sales and marketing group.

Nevertheless, Google's advertising-driven results stand in stark contrast to those reported by sagging print media titles. The company's net income rose 8.4% in its first quarter to $1.42 billion, or $4.49 cents a share, from $1.31 billion, or $4.12, in the corresponding period a year earlier.

Excluding special items, Google reported earnings of $5.16 per share, beating the consensus estimate of $4.93 reported by Thomson Reuters. After subtracting traffic-acquisition costs, sales rose 10% to $4.07 billion from $3.70 billlion.

However, the results do mark the first sequential sales drop for the online powerhouse, with sales, when not adjusted for traffic-acquisition costs, down 3% from the previous quarter.

Google shares surged $19.52, or 5.02%, to $409.25 in after-hours trading.

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Google's Biggest Failure Is Marissa Mayer

Google's perfectionist cupcake princess is totally misunderstood! That's the claim Marissa Mayer the VP who oversees Google search, makes to a credulous New York Times, which licks up the frosted version of her career.

Mayer, who runs Google's core search business, is the best known Google executive outside the search engine's CEO, Eric Schmidt, and its billionaire founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And she's proven far more willing to pose for magazine covers and appear on morning news shows, making her the company's public face.

But she seems surprised that with such publicity comes criticism. According to Mayer, the reason why she draws negative press is because of sexism and stereotypes:

I think it's very comforting for people to put me in a box. ‘Oh, she's a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.'

It's true that San Francisco, the last mainstream publication to profile her, focused on her most girly habits. But that has nothing to do with why so many rank-and-file Googlers outside the company's cloistered management despise Mayer.

To grasp that, it helps to understand Google's grandiose self-image: The company's spoiled engineers are led to believe they work in the most perfect meritocracy of ideas that the world has ever seen, motivated by the betterment of mankind through technology. At Google, the theory goes, who you are and who you know doesn't matter. It's only your ideas that count.

And yet, as the Times profile reveals, the real source of her power is the ability to manipulate Schmidt, Page, and Brin:

" Given her longstanding relationship with Google's founders and Mr. Schmidt, she has become something of a sounding board for other managers, a number of whom routinely gravitate to her office.

At the end of a recent day, she met with two senior executives, Joe Kraus and Sundar Pichai, to discuss the company's social networking projects. Many executives at Google believe that social networking is important to its future. Ms. Mayer was meeting with Mr. Kraus and Mr. Pichai to help them prepare for a meeting the next day with Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page to discuss how the company could leverage information-sharing among Google's many services.

"It's important you pregame Eric or it will be a disaster," Mr. Pichai tells Ms. Mayer about the pending meeting, asking her to seek Mr. Schmidt's support on their behalf.

"I know, I know," she responds. "I will call him or write an e-mail. I want them to see how complicated this will be."

Ms. Mayer e-mails Mr. Schmidt that evening. At the meeting the next day, Mr. Pichai's and Mr. Kraus's ideas are approved

The Times article does not mention a key reason why Mayer has such influence: Early in the company's history, she dated Page. (He is now married, and Mayer is engaged to Zack Bogue, a real-estate investment manager and lawyer.)

In dictating the appearance of Google's Web pages, Mayer freely admits she makes subjective decisions. In more than a decade on the job, she has not yet codified her design instinct into a written style guide. Instead, Mayer's whims, which managers under her must make a study of, are what rule.

Mayer may be talented. But her personal ties to Google's top management and her exerscise of arbitrary power are a betrayal of Google's supposedly meritocratic values — a betrayal obviously tolerated at the very top of the company. That, and not her spending time putting cupcake recipes in spreadsheets, is what exasperates her fellow Googlers.

That, and her perfectionist streak. Look at how Mayer dismisses a potential hire over a single bad grade:

" One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. "That's troubling to me," Ms. Mayer says. "Good students are good at all things."

Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of 3.5, out of 4, which meant she had exceeded her manager's expectations. Ms. Mayer is suspicious, however, because her rating hasn't changed in several quarters.

"She is looking for a way out," Ms. Mayer says.

Mayer complains that the media has not examined her life deeply:

Besides, Ms. Mayer says, there are some things that she hasn't previously revealed about herself and that the media have overlooked. Like her self-described athletic prowess.

"It hasn't shown up anywhere that I am really physically active," she says. "I ran the San Francisco half marathon this year. I did the Portland marathon. I went skiing just yesterday. I'm going to do the Birkebeiner, which is North America's longest cross-country ski race. That just shows you how much there are gaps."

Ah yes, the Portland Marathon, in which Mayer placed 7,074th out of 7,862 contestants. Or the Birkebeiner ski race, in which she placed dead last in the women's competition. Good students are good at all things.

Did she really mean to invite media scrutiny of her athletic career? What's really telling about it: In the handful of times where Mayer has competed on her own, without the backing of a billionaire ex-boyfriend and a pliant boss, she has proven to be an outright failure.

At the beginning of the piece, Mayer once again denies rumors of her impending departure from Google — rumors which Valleywag first reported. Perhaps she has realized that without Google, she's nothing. Can you blame her for clinging to her job?

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