Google Wave , “a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web” is the latest brain child of Google, developed and built buy the same team of developers that brought us Google Maps.
The description left me confused when I first read it, communication and collaborating has already been done through emails, IM, online apps like Google Docs and the increasing usage of the cloud philosophy, and even this hasn’t really taken off at the scale we’d like it to.
However Google Wave goes a bit beyond all of these:
- Imagine IM in real time ( when I say real time, I’m talking about seeing what the other person is typing as they type )
- Email which works like a conversation not only letting you treat responses as a conversation but also lets you reply within previously sent messages.
- Document collaboration with all of the above features.
- Seamless and intuitive integration of , blogs, text, photos, videos, maps and I’m sure more will follow with the it’s public launch.
- Open source so companies, individuals and pretty much anyone who wants to can use it for their own purpose.
- All of this and more in one interface and communication protocol.
These are just a few of the features I got my head round, may not sound as glamorous as you may expect but watch the demo of Wave below and you’ll start to understand how radically different wave is.
The only question left to answer is whether it will catch on, people like communicating in many different way in some cases the novelty of doing exactly that is what we seek, for example Twitter, most of us could just stick to Facebook or My-space but Twitter is different and offers a different experience. Trying to merge experiences into one large experience could backfire. That said, Google seem to always know what they are doing, time will tell if it will be as successful as they’d like it to be.
2 Responses
Tweets on Google Wave http://twitter.com/wavety
I think i’ve seen this somewhere before…but it’s not bad at all