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 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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