Friday, May 29, 2009

Google Wave - Google mashes up new conversation method

What is it?

  • It’s a communication and collaboration tool.
  • A ‘Wave’ is a collaborative conversation, but way more advanced than a simple group IM or email.
  • It uses real-time all-party data to update info for all participants.
  • They’ve only been working on it for 2 years.

So?

  • It’s open-source, allowing anyone to develop extra bits for it.
  • Developers already have open-source accounts, so when it launches there will be a ton of extras already.
  • It’s like having IM in an email thread, except it shows character by character, rather than “Leon is typing…..” for 5 mins and then showing the message
  • Join/be added to a conversation half-way through, and see all the stuff that’s gone on
  • Reply to a previous part of a conversation – all participants see your input, even though it’s late
  • Watch ‘conversations’ like video, viewing the playback of how it got to where it is
  • Add music files, video files, images to a conversations, all people see them. No uploading to flickr & sending a link for example
  • It seems massively extensible: do a google search from within the Wave and add the link/image etc without needing to go off to a different site and copy things over
  • Add Google Maps to your conversation, change the zoom etc after embedding and it updates in real-time for all participants

Further reading…

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