A couple weeks ago, my friend who works at Google said to me: we’re working on something big at Google. Maybe I can show you a sneak preview soon, but don’t tell anyone. It’s top secret.

If you’re an online nerd and you read techcrunch and similar valley blogs, you already know what I’m talking about, as they officially announced it yesterday. It’s called Google Wave, and it’s gonna be big.

In the brief history of internet, different internet protocols were developed which define the internet today, like email, browsing, chat, etc. But the possibilities of online media today are huge, while we are still trapped in those old protocols. What Google basically is doing is throwing different communication protocols together and create something entirely new. Something that will redefine the way how we communicate, something that will redefine the whole internet if you ask me.

I have much respect for Google. They won the big jackpot when they invented their advertising system, and they’re basically drowning in money. But instead of just buying up an island the size of France an go cruise around it with their yacht, they actually give it back to society. They invest all this money in bringing the best of the best engineers together with only one goal: stepping up the whole evolution. It’s thanks to this kind of people that we don’t live in trees anymore.

So about Google Wave. Email is inefficient, it is a chaotic one-dimensional sending around of information, while chatting is a bit more real time but not practical in the same way as email is. The main big thing about Wave is that it takes the idea of email, puts it in a central server-hosted cloud system the same way as Google Docs work, and combines that with the real-timeness of chat. Even more real-time, as in character-by-character realtime. Basically, they’re creating a new protocol, that on the long run probably will overwrite many current protocols.

The way people communicate in real life, by speech, is in terms of science an inefficient form of data transfer. Direct thought exchange would be way more efficient, and if we can continue the way we are evolving, techno-evolutionists like myself believe that at one point we will actually be able to do that. Email is in a same way a non-efficient way of communicating, and I see this evolution as the online equivalent of directly interchanging thoughts, without the time-consuming detour of actually pronouncing them — or in the case of Wave, sending them.

I do not only think this is a great step in online communication, I also think it is an extremely interesting step in the evolution of the internet. I was wondering how it would evolve after this. Ok, there’s all these things popping up the last years, like facebook and twitter and blabla. But they’re all just gimmicks and none of them actually changes anything structural. Google wave has the possibility to do that, and the ambition. The coming 10 years of the internet become suddenly more clear.

The future is to the cloud, the power is to the crowd. The whole thing is released open-source, what creates the ability for it to grow organically, and beyond the possibilities of any company, even Google. It also creates a certain unpredictability. Really interesting.

If you’re familiar with the theory of the Technocalyps, this gives a little sneak preview of how we, in the coming decades, will evolve transhuman. At one point, artificial intelligence now used to choose which ads to display on your homepage, will be applied to the bigger picture and that is the point where we actually will create something bigger than ourselves. Where the cloud comes more powerful than the crowd.

Because, if you didn’t realize this yet…

Google. Is. Skynet.