Google I/O viewed from IOwa.

With some software presentations, you are overwhelmed by the show but afterwards the gee-wiz wears off as you start to piece together what is going on. But the more I think about Google Wave, the more the ideas are growing on me. At this time, hardly anyone has heard about Google Wave, but that is going to change. Within a few years, Google Wave could be recognized one of the few paradigm changing applications, much like hypertext going mainstream was to the growing of the web in the 1990's.

In the developer preview, there were no lack of eye-popping features:

• Drag and drop photos from iPhoto into the browser. Really cool use of Gears and GWT. Watching the photo upload automatically and appear on the other browsers in seconds was a direct reminder to me that we are only beginning to understand how the web can connect us.
• Watching real-time translation between French and English shows how we are going to be able to interact more freely in wider communities.
• The multiple, concurrent editing of a single document shows how much power there is concurrent versioning systems.
• The use of associative memory, which resides not only on the server, but is shared with each participant is part of the secret sauce that makes is seem that everyone on the wave is 'together'.

This just seems like it is the next phase in the evolution of the world wide web. Before this, the web was a bunch of places to go. With Wave, it will become a bunch of events to join, review and create.