When Google made the announcement of Google Wave – with first screenshots of the application showing up – I immediately thought: finally they seem to understand what the future of web/browser based real time communication could look like. And my next thought was: will they ever be able to deliver a user experience as good as the one Laszlo Webtop gives us right now. Let’s look at screenshots of both applications to give everyone a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
Google Wave looks like a modern, Ajax based portal with a desktop/web OS like user interface.
Google Wave - a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web
And here a screenshot of the Laszlo Digital Life applications suit as Laszlo Systems envisioned the solution back in 2006/2007. A WebOS like UI with dock, window manager, pre-built animations for state-changes and the power of the OpenLaszlo RIA framework in the background:
Laszlo Webtop - Laszlo Digital Life Suite
Both solutions bring the desktop paradigm – including the flexibility content modification and distribution (mark, copy, paste, insert) – to the web. Both applications show a UI we know from the various window-based OS UIs in the market. And both products center around the contact list and multiple forms of communication/messages: Various text formats, visual information like images, videos and in Laszlo’s case voice messaging. Google takes the concept of collaboration in communication a bit further, as Tim O’Reilly observes:
“Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Google Wave. As Lars describes it, ‘We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?’
In answering the question, Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.”
Laszlo has a powerful concept of possibly turning all visual elements of the Webtop UI into communication bits that can be passed between applications in Webtop: When Laszlo first demoed the Laszlo Webtop in March 2007, the demo already contained a chat client with support for SmartObjects. Here’s a definition of SmartObjects from the Laszlo Webtop product page:
“Laszlo Webtop provides a framework for drag and drop via data objects called SmartObjects. SmartObjects can be used to move data, such as Events, Contacts and emails within and across applications. Laszlo Webtop applications can define their own SmartObjects. Once defined, any other application may leverage the definition and behaviors of the SmartObject.”
Google Wave and Laszlo Webtop make it possible to enrich communication and give the users more flexibility in the way they can communicate. Based on the limited knowledge of Google Way right now, Google tries to implement a more consumer friendly/consumer facing UI with a better user experience, something Laszlo has been doing for the last 8 years.
Alcatel-Lucent Rich Communications Manager built with Laszlo Webtop
When Alcatel – a global Laszlo OEM partner – presented their 5155 Rich Client Communications Manager a few weeks ago, several experts expressed the opinion that the product is a tough competitor for Google Voice:
“Not long after Google re-launched Grand Central as Google Voice, Alcatel-Lucent is aiming to give its traditional telco and service provider customers a platform enhancement to match some of the Google offering’s Web-based features, while also tying the platform into service provider back office and network systems.
The vendor formally announced Release 2.1 of its 5155 Rich Communications Manager today, and plans to demonstrate the platform enhancements at CTIA Wireless 2009 in Las Vegas later this week. RCM 2.1 is a Web portal-based offering that, similar to the Google Voice unified communications approach, integrates multiple service capabilities, including voicemail, SMS, e-mail and others for access via different types of fixed and mobile devices. Though it does not support VoIP calling in its current iteration, it will in the future.”
Laszlo definitely has the expertise to built some of the most advanced browser based applications with a superb user experience. Just look at applications like the Laszlo Calendar in Webtop, in my eyes the best web calendar experience you can get right now. Adam Wolff, one of the developers of the Laszlo Calendar application, shows some of the stunning features of the application:
The world is big enough to see more than one player in the webtop communication market, but Laszlo seems to be ahead in the game right now – when it comes to standard communication like email, voice mail, chat, video messaging, sms and mms. Google’s concept of a Wave is a powerful concept for a more interwoven and flexible way of collaboration, but similar features can easily be embedded into Laszlo Webtop.
Links:
Google Wave Preview
Google Wave API
Google Web Toolkit
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