After close to two years, Google has yet again come up with a breakthrough product- the Google Wave. ‘Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more’ (Google Wave).
Google Wave is especially convenient for organizing events, doing group projects, sharing photos, sending meeting notes, brainstorming or playing interactive games. Any part of the wave can be edited with a single click, and changes are updated live on screen, which enables others to collaborate with the author of the documents.
With the collaborative editing and inline conversations enabled with Google Wave, different teams in an organization can work on different parts of a project, and merge their documents into the product wave. This means that more than one person can edit the same message at the same time and still transmit the messages live on the wire. When there are too many documents cluttering up, there are always tools for organizing these waves- through folders and tags, which could also be done by anyone else in the wave.
Like many browsers today, Google Wave enables extensions which extend the functionality of waves. For example, a few powerful extensions include spell checker (aka Spelly); Linky which recognizes links allowing videos to be embed; Searchy where you can insert anything you find from the web; Google Map and more. All these extensions when put into the wave allow editing or comments to be inserted at any point. There is also the amazing extension that I found extremely impressive- the Rosy etta which instantly translates more than 40 languages word by word, character by character during a live chat.
There is more to Google Wave than what I have mentioned here. There is the Federation Protocol where waves can be shared across boundaries and organizations despite the different wave systems. Playback wave is also a powerful tool which enables one to investigate and manipulate any part of the history of the wave, such as who did what and when.
It is impossible to explain the infinite functions that Google Wave provides. Although it is a fairly new product, I am positive that this will give a whole new meaning to communication, and what the internet can do to bring the universe into real-time interaction.
For a more detailed insight into what Google Wave can do, watch the demo.
Oh, and guess what, I learnt about this on Twitter.
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