Greetings to Google Wave, a unique experimental service from the company that, according to many, has the potential to be the next big thing after e-mail and bundles instant messaging, photo sharing and other tools in sone application. This new Wave has been described as “a real-time communication platform which combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client”.
Google Wave is the creation of the same team that was behind Google Maps and the bunch seems to have run into something revolutionary, right from the outset! This five-person startup looks all set to be one of the most talked about Google products ever.
According to a Software Engineering Manager who introduced Wave at Google I/O, :
A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the Web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.
To simplify things, consider it to be an extension, or rather an evolution of existing e-mail, IM and file-sharing technologies. With Wave, users can share images, videos, converse in what Google terms a collaborative conversation stream.
In Google Wave users can create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content -- it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave to see how it evolved."
You can then refer back to a Wave to see the whole conversation and document thread. When a Wave is open on two users' screens, messages bounce right off Google's servers into another user's browsers to enable instant messaging-like communication.
Users don't even need to hit send to communicate their message as each typed character shows up in the other Wave user's browser less than a second after it's been typed. True real time.
You can also check a box to keep communication private until you're ready for the recipient to see what you've written. Want to add more participants to the conversation? Just drag and drop the contact into the browser window.
Another facet of Google Wave is that this happens to be an Open Source project, and more of a platform, less a finished product. So, what we're talking bout here is an entire new API that allows developers to do almost anything they please, like integrating a Twitter client, playing games on to a wave. From gaming or official work to a simple chat, the Google Wave might just change the way we communicate with our buddies, in the near future.
There are plenty of other features, all of which make the product more fascinating. Have you signed up for the test coming later this year? It's good to get in at the ground floor. The more you test it and give Google your precious feedback, the better the product should be in the end.
