Last week a colleague sent a link to the upcoming Google Wave, a developer preview at Google I/O 2009. So, what is Google Wave? and why am I so excited now for the release?
An overview of Google Wave
I want to summarise some of the features in the video in which Google demonstrated Wave to many developers. The summary and view will, of course, be from my viewpoint and from how envision using it.
Firstly is see Wave is an alternative to email, though actually it is many forms of communication brought together onto one platform. Starting with the email viewpoint it works by having a conversation at the centre, rather than the people. A conversation is created, the recipients add to that - this is in a similar way to a web forum. When both users are logged in they can talk directly to each other, like a chat application within that email. The sections are broken down so that conversation and noise are not overwhelming the content and information.
The conversation builds up in a rich way. Photos and documents can easily be pulled in and can also be collaboratively edited. Multiple users can be brought into the conversation (or parts of the conversation) to make a shared work space form out of that conversation.
At this stage it might seem like there is too much going on, but rather it is about the fact that every topic has many other connections to other topics - these topics and conversations are those seperate messages and streams of information all connected. So there may be an official document for multiple colleagues to edit and read, whilst they view that - and see each other - they can comment and discuss, starting a new conversation tree. These topics and conversations are all central objects as mentioned, others can easily be brought into those conversations or parts of them.
The Wave messages, streams and imported documents can be embedded into other applications. There is also an API allowing many other applications connected to this.
As I said - this is a narrow view from my perspective. After actually seeing the application demonstration I am very excited to make use of this. I think both personally and in business this can be an incredibly powerful application. I’m quite excited to see how quickly it takes off.
