Google Wave – Unifying communication on the Web

Google is now giving developers an early preview of Google “Wave”, encouraging them to ride into the future of emails, opening inboxes to richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, social network feeds, and more.

Google Wave has been created by the two guys behind Google Maps, along with a small team in Sydney. The concept behind Google Wave is to “unify” communication on the internet – more like a hybrid of email, web chat, IM, and project management software.

Google Wave is well suited for quick messages as well as for persistent content, as it allows for both collaboration and communication. It has the ability to replay conversations because it records the entire sequence of communication, character by character. Because of this, discussions are also live in Google Wave, which means you could even see your friends type character-by-character.

Features:

With Google wave you can:

1. Use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web.
2. Insert a reply or edit the wave directly.
3. See on your screen instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.
4. Use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The 3 layers of Google Wave:

1. Google Wave product is a web application built on Google Web Toolkit that people will use to access and edit waves. It includes a rich text editor, other functions like desktop drag-and-drop, etc.
2. Google Wave platform allows developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
3. Google Wave protocol is for storing and sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control allowing edits to be instantly reflected across users and services.

The computer code for Wave will be open source, meaning developers are free to modify it as they wish. Although no launch date for Wave has been specified, but looks like it could be available to the public by later this year. Right now it’s only available to a select group of developers, who will be able to create their own Wave servers.

Link: Google Wave

(Source & Image credit: Google blog)