One thing that you rarely hear in the Bluhalo office, is a group of developers whooping and wolf whistling en masse. Therefore, I can only conclude that the group of 4000 developers who attended the Google Wave Developer Preview I/O 2009, and did just that, were watching something incredibly exciting.
Many of us have been impressed, if not slightly dumbfounded, with the boom in popularity of online social networking that has occurred over the past few of years. Sites such as Bebo, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter seem to have shot up in popularity almost overnight, to the point where those who are not involved begin to feel rather like social pariahs.
Google Wave seems set to trump all of these social networking sites, or at least be made available to be imbedded in the most popular of these. Users can also integrate their networking sites into Google Wave.
Mashable describes the Google Wave as “a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.”
Most of Google Wave is real time. It even, in my opinion, out-does Instant Messaging. Although with many IM services, we are made aware of the fact that the participants in our conversation are writing a message, we are still made to wait for them to hit return, prior to viewing their message and responding. With Google Wave, conversations are truly live because participants can see others type character by character.
A Wave, or topic, is opened, and invited participants are free to contribute. It is truly collaborative. There is also a playback tool so that users can view the history of the Wave and edit at any point, should they so wish. More than one user can also edit a wave at once.
Here, we have given a brief mention to just a few of the cool features…
- There is a translation tool called ‘Rosy’, which enables users to contribute in their own language, which will then be translated to the chosen language, should the participants wish. This happens as the user types.
- A Google search can be conducted from inside a wave, which will then give the writer the option of adding a link.
- A place name can be converted to a map.
- Videos can be embedded.
- Even the spell check is advanced- ‘Spelly’, as the Google development team are affectionately nicknaming it, takes the context of a word and matches it against an enormous language model that has been built from much of the world wide web.
There are also many other “nicknames’ that we will need to get used to. One of these is ‘Twave’. A Twave is a Wave of Tweets. Once the Twave has been embedded in the Wave, everyone following this Tweet on Twitter, can make comments which will also appear on the Wave.
The development team have warned that it may take time for some of users to realize many of the benefits of the Wave because we are so used to working with older tools but although Google are still developing this for use in the workplace, so far, the Wave is shaping up to be a great tool for document production.
The list of cool things that can be done using this tool is almost endless so we will leave you to explore the possibilities further yourselves by watching the Developer Preview on YouTube.
Anya Gooch
Account Manager
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