Technology Update - Google Wave

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Have you heard of Google Wave? It’s Google’s new online collaborative tool with a host of exciting new functionality. Wave will bring together e-mail, instant messaging, online forums, and wikis into one great offering.

Have you heard of Google Wave? It’s Google’s new online collaborative tool with a host of exciting new functionality. Wave will bring together e-mail, instant messaging, online forums, and wikis into one great offering.

What would email look like if it was invented today? That's the question Google engineers asked themselves - and the result is Google Wave. Unveiled on May 28, 2009 at Google's I/O Conference in San Francisco, Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool, with a strong focus on concurrency.

With the ambitious goal of succeeding email, Wave builds on the features of many of the most popular communication methods of today, including wikis, instant messaging, social networking, media sharing sites, and blogs. Unlike the end-to-end nature of email, Waves exist on a central server, where participants can contribute to conversations real-time. A Wave blurs the lines between a discussion and a document, with rich-text editing, photos, gadgets, and feeds combining in a unique, free-form workspace. [See Screenshots]

A smattering of impressive features were demonstrated at I/O - most notably, the ability to 'play back' a Wave. This allows participants to observe the order in which a conversation unfolded, or to examine the evolution of a jointly-authored document. Context-aware spelling and grammar checking looks to be a highly useful tool, and automatic real-time language translation also drew rousing applause from the audience.

Perhaps most excitingly, Google Wave is to be open-sourced, meaning that software developers around the world will be able to contribute to and extend the service. Industry leaders (like Brightlabs!) will be at the forefront of adopting this technology, building robot extensions to automate common tasks, and creating gadgets to provide users with a new way to interact. The ability to embed Waves within websites is likely to be a popular collaborative choice when the service kicks off, and may even become an integral part of cutting-edge communication strategies.

It is expected that Google Wave will officially launch later this year. Stay tuned!

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