It’s now a month since 100,000 of the hottest invites since gmail went out and Google’s new-born made the transition from sandbox cot to dedicated server nursery. So what is Google Wave really all about?

First of all, despite the way it was pitched on initial launch, Wave is not simply a replacement for instant messaging or email, although it does incorporate features that look very similar to those communication modes. Nor is it a new form of social media along the lines of Facebook or Twitter.

What makes it different to these is that instead of propagating or exchanging discrete chunks of content across the web, it supports the collaborative creation of self-contained documents in a specific, single location.

What is so revolutionary about that? In a way, making a self-contained document the canonical content source, without copies elsewhere, is a return to the early days of the web, when individual pages authored in HTML were served as read-only content in response to individual requests, and only further networked via hyperlinks.

A Wave differs from a page of HTML in a very important way, however. As its name suggests, it contains fluid, rather than static, content. Not (necessarily) animated CGI graphics of waterfalls but a collaboratively created and edited real-time stream of text, audio and video coalescing into a single constantly updated content element.

Imagine the future of news, as Jeff Jarvis does: three journalists, four witnesses and two editors together create a story using text, audio and video using laptops and mobile phones which they format at the scene of an event and then publish everywhere, to all kinds of devices, instantly. Think then of others responding to this news story by contributing their own perspectives and unique content, not just in the form of comments and feedback, but by directly inserting new material into the document. That would be a Wave, changing form as it rolled out in all directions at once.

So is a Wave like a wiki? Wikis and Waves are certainly both collaborative creation and editing tools, but as those who have edited a Wikipedia article know, there are two faces to every page on the site. Each article not only has a public-facing content page, it also incorporates revisions and discussion pages which are only visible to its editors.

Waves, by contrast, are about simultaneously editing a document and having those edits fuse into a single piece of content, with discussion and edited summary both visible. And when I say simultaneous, I mean exactly that: the operational transform protocol that powers a Wave is very nearly synchronous, even across federated servers, meaning that as you add new text on your screen I see your keystrokes included in the Wave on mine.

So will Google Wave roll out and absorb everything in its path? It certainly represents a completely new kind of web platform, and promises to become at least as ubiquitous as RSS, even if also mostly invisible to the end consumer. But is most of the noise around it because, as Gina Trapani remarked, ‘Wave is to developer’s egos as complex jazz is to musicians’? It is true that one of its strengths is that developing gadgets and bots to extend its core functionality resembles the familiar web development process that has allowed so many coders to profit from the enormous success of Facebook, Twitter et al.

On the other hand, there are a couple of as yet unresolved technical issues which prompt criticism, despite the project’s alpha development stage. One problem is that there is currently no whitelisting or permissions system to control the accessibility of identifying contact information which not only makes privacy an issue but also makes spam control impossible. This must be a priority for the beta release.

The other, perhaps more intractable, issue is that the Wave operational transform protocol does not output simple HTML, which would facilitate universal one-step publishing, instead preferring a custom Wave document format written in XML which has made developers’ eyes roll. Whether the Wave team choose to move on from this position remains to be seen.

And there are some questions about the ways we might use Wave in the real world. At the moment, Wave’s federal core means that while all participants in a particular Wave remain on a single server, others cannot see what they are up to: it is only when others are invited to join in that the wave federates across servers, propagating changes as they are made. While this looks ideal for private document management inside organisations, it doesn’t support the new media publishing vision outlined above.

Another issue is the missing consensus process that makes Wikipedia function so well. Waves, like wikis, need shared goals (in the case of Wikipedia, a neutral point of view) to guide their creation. Without such consensus, the deletion that content editing requires could be perceived as a hostile, or at least censorious, act. The social psychology that accounts for the way many are motivated to contribute to some of the web’s greatest successes may need careful consideration before the Wave user experience design team settles on such unmediated interaction modes.

For now, in the absence of public Waves (you still need an invite to see what’s going on first hand), here’s an entertaining glimpse into the flavour of the platform, courtesy of Whirled Interactive:

If you want to know more about what you currently can and cannot do with Wave and its gadgets and bots, you would do well to check out Gina Trapani’s Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Via This Week in Google Episode 10.