Gutterspeak

I see that Google is not going to continue developing Wave. That’s what they get for stealing my idea.

Ok. They didn’t steal my idea. But several years ago the guys I work with and I had this idea for a collaborative messaging system that would be kind of like a mixture of email, Usenet, and IM. It would be like email in that messages would arrive asynchronously if you weren’t online. It would be like IM in that messages would arrive synchronously if you were online. It would be like Usenet in that discussions would persist so that people coming in to the discussion late would be able to go back through all the messages to see what they had missed. Also, and I believe this isn’t in Wave, discussions could be either private or public. Private discussions would require an invitation to join. Public discussions could be discovered by anybody. Anybody could participate in public discussions as well. I imagined that people would have a way of discovering public discussions and joining those they like. Kind of like Usenet. Perhaps people could discover private discussions as well, but not be able to see the messages without being invited to join? Or maybe there would be three protection levels: public, protected, and private. Public discussions would be open to all. Private discussions would be hidden and invitation only. Protected discussions would be read-only for those not invited.

When I first saw Wave, I imagined it worked exactly like my co-workers and I had envisioned our collaboration software would work. I set out to see if I could discover waves to join. But, at least in the beginning, that didn’t seem possible. I lost interest pretty quickly and never really kept up with Wave, so maybe they implemented something like discoverable waves and I just never saw it.

Now that I think about it, I guess in some ways Facebook is also like our collaborative messaging system. The implementation isn’t exactly as I had envisioned, but I think it might have all of the features. My friends post updates, which I see when I visit my Facebook page. I can comment, and my comments can be seen by other friends. If I become friends with somebody, I can immediately see their past updates and they can see mine.

Rather than be discussion-based, messages on Facebook tend to be friend-centered. But it is also possible to create Facebook groups (right? I’m not all that up on Facebook, actually) to which people can “join” (by “liking” the group? again, not that up on Facebook). Perhaps that works a bit like a discussion?

So there you have it. My co-workers and I were way ahead of our time. We thought of Wave (or Facebook), but were too lazy to implement it. But if we had, we might have been the first Facebook. Or, the first Wave.

Or, more likely, some unknown piece of software that nobody would even be aware of.