What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is a new initiative announced by Google last May. Google describes Wave as “Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” Wave has not yet been released and Google is releasing it to testers on an invitation only basis.
The brains behind Wave are two developers who who small mapping software company was acquired  by Google in 2004. The developed the concept for what is now called Google Wave and have now moved onto that project.
The idea behind Wave is to bring together into one interface many different communication technologies. The hope is that this will create a new communication paradigm.
They took a look at two of the biggest successes so far in digital communication, email and instant messaging. These are originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. They visualized a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point and codenamed their new project “Walkabout.”
According to an article on the Google about this, they  started by asking themselves these questions:
- Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
- Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
- What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?
Getting Wave Off The Ground
Working with a five-person team, they spend two years developing the first prototype of what is now called Wave. As the define it, A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Click on the image below to see a screenshot of the Wave interface.
Here’s how it works: 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.
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 and see how it evolved.
Click here to view Google’s video explaining Google Wave.
3 Comments
November 10th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Hi, I found your blog in a new directory of blogs today, I read a few of your other posts and really liked it. I bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later…
February 6th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
I’m not sure if I completely agree… But, you do make some great points. Maybe I can blog a post in opposition to your post here.
February 7th, 2010 at 7:51 am
Hello Antionoiri,
I would love to see a counterpoint! Please understand though that this is a business SEO blog so be respectful in your disagreement, ok? Go ahead and do another post in response to our original post and we’ll approve it.
Best,
Jason Stanard
President