The Wave Called Google Wave

Last month, Google started sending out invites to 100,000 beta users and fortunately, I received one. Yay Google! As always, it was a very impressive application that brings collaboration to the next level. Still in beta, developers can now create their own gadgets.

For those of you who just woke up because of all these buzz about Google Wave, it is a real-time communication platform. It combines characteristics of email, instant messaging, wikis, chat, social networking and project collaboration.

They said, email was invented 40 years ago and if email will be invented today, it will be like Google Wave. Do you think this is the future of content collaboration? I wonder how the corporate space is reactive to all this development. They all have been seeking ways on how to do more collaboration efforts. Is Google Wave the answer?

Why Are Geeks Excited About It?

Open Source – The code of Google Wave is open source. With this, it will be easier for developers to build on top of it thru its API.

Real-Time – A Web client that displays activities by all participant working on a wave.

Extensions – Developers have the ability to develop their own extensions or gadgets.

Automatic Language Translation – 2 participants, each with their default language (e.g. English and French), every time someone types a message in a wave, it is automatically translated in the other participant’s screen.

Playback – Participants can replay the history of a wave or how other participants participated in a wave.

File Sharing – Unlike email which uses attachments, Google wave enables drag and drop file sharing for every participant to see or use.

Web 2.0 Tools – You can actually add Twitter and Blogger to Google wave as participants. In the future, we will be seeing more Web 2.0 tools.

Other Information

Google Wave is relatively a new application and with what I have seen, I believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg. We will be seeing more waves in the coming months.