Google Wave: The future of internet conversations?

BANGALORE: Google Wave is the latest buzz to hit the internet shores. The Web search giant—it has already sent out 100,000 select invites for a limited preview—has announced what it claims to be the future of all internet conversations. What Wave does is to integrate e-mail, instant messaging (IM), collaboration, Google maps as well as search. It actually empowers your browser to handle all your communication needs. The Wave, however, requires a Chrome Frame plug-in to function on the ubiquitous Internet Explorer as of now. The preferred browsers seem to be Chrome, open source Firefox and Apple’s Safari. As Google Wave’s engineering manager Lars Rasmussen puts it: “Wave is an attempt at redefining communication over the internet.” It’s a contemporary take at the four-decade-old e-mail. Google makes an innovation leap with the Wave. Wave is both a product and an open source platform for developers for building new apps. Wave’s most striking feature is its speed. It lets users transfer data, pictures and filesrealtime and also facilitates collaborative editing. Every letter typed in is transmitted immediately into the other user’s Wave. Even images can be transmitted with almost no time loss. Once a new wave is created, akin to composing a mail in your e-mail account, you can add contacts and the wave is sent to them. All the people included in the wave can immediately reply or start editing the wave. John Misczak, a student from Pensylvania , US, says: “I would like it (Wave) to become my one-stop-shop for everything on the Web. Answer my GMail, check my Google Calendar, read my feeds on Google reader, and update my Blogspot blog.” There are also a few common-sense applications that can come in handy for business users as well as others. Wave’s map application lets you plan trips using Google maps on the Wave collaboratively. An application that Google calls the ‘Yes/No/Maybe’ gadget is an efficient collaborative tool that helps start an instant poll among friends or for business. A poll on the public wave, do you like Wave?, using the Yes/No/Maybe gadget had 39 respondents of which an overwhelming 27 said yes and 10 said maybe and only 2 said no. Once a wave is initiated, anybody involved in the wave can reply to or edit any part of the original wave. For one, if the initiator of the wave sends out five questions and the other user can click on each question and answer it right below. An interesting feature of the Wave is the playback button. Even if a person is invited into a wave much later, he’ll still be able to view the entire thread using the very useful playback button, which lets users see the entire wave one change at a time using a slider. Google has also added gaming apps such as sudoku and hangman. Also, widgetslike Bloggy and Tweety the Twitbot lets users publish waves on their blogs and also update their Twitter accounts from the Wave itself. Wave has an easy-to-use interface with a flexible design template. Being a developer preview, Wave’s a bit buggy and many features still don’t respond such as folders. Google Wave Google wants to create a wave, yet again. With Google Wave, a new tool that allows users to email, chat, play games, hold video conferences, edit documents, add images and conduct search, all in a single window. Google introduced this open source initiative on a trial basis to 1 lakh users on Sep 30. Image courtesy: Google

What is Google Wave

Google Wave is a real-time multifaceted communication and collaboration platform. It unifies different web technologies such as email, instant messaging, wiki, online documents and social networking. How does it work? In Wave, one creates a wave and adds people to it. Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets and online feeds to respond to and edit the wave on real time. Its instant and one can see what others are typing in a wave. A user can also use 'playback' to rewind the wave and see how it evolved. Rival Applications Google Wave works on the idea of providing a real-time communication and collaboration by integrating established and emerging web technolgies. Colayer, a Swiss-Indian software company, already provides a platform for companies to communicate, collaborate and co-create by building interactive social Web 2.0 environment Microsoft, which is trying hard to catch up with Google on the internet, and Yahoo are widely expected to come up with Wave-like offerings. Buying out Colayer may be an option all three might be looking at. Business potential Google encourages third party developers to build applications for Wave and plans to set up an online store similar to Apple App store to help them sell their apps. Other similar services are expected to do the same. These stores will give programmers and their financial backers a share in the success of the services that can potentially woo users away from Facebook, Gmail and Skype. Also, marketing agencies are exploring ways to use Wave to grow their clients' brands. Apps already on Wave Ribbit: Lets users place Web calls and create multi-user conference calls. It can automatically transcribe voice into text. LabPixies: A free sudoku puzzle game that allows for real-time competitive play. 6rounds: Lets users communicate through video conferencing. LonelyPlanet: Helps users co-create travel itinerary. AccuWeather: Provides weather forecast for any location, any date. Google Maps: Allows users in different places to explore the map together. Wave terminologies Wave: A container for enhanced set of threaded conversations that is viewable as a document. It modifies real time and stores historical information. Wavelet: A threaded conversation spawned within a wave. All participants on a wavelet have read/write access to content within the wavelet. Blip: A single message that appears in a wavelet. Participants: Each wave has a set of one or more participants who engage and interact in a wave. Participants are added to a wave by existing participants. And here’s the first user experience John Misczak, a student from Pensylvania , US, says: “I would like it (Wave) to become my one-stop-shop for everything on the Web. Answer my GMail, check my Google Calendar, read my feeds on Google reader, and update my Blogspot blog.” As Google Wave’s engineering manager Lars Rasmussen puts it: “Wave is an attempt at redefining communication over the internet.” It’s a contemporary take at the four-decade-old e-mail . Google makes an innovation leap with the Wave. Wave is both a product and an open source platform for developers for building new apps.