Wave is Google’s latest effort to bring online communication one step
further and should be available to the public later this year.
What is Google Wave?
What Google Wave seems to do is combine email and instant messaging to create something that acts like both. It creates an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to discuss recent news, create documents collaboratively, plan events, and heaps more.
How does Google Wave work?
Google Wave runs on a web browser and is hosted by Google, similar to other services such as Gmail. Conversations in Google Wave are called Waves. You create a wave and add people to it by dragging and dropping others users' icons into the Wave so they become part of the conversation. The new Wave appears at the top of their Google Wave inbox. You can also include external users using their email address. Everyone on your wave can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. They can use richly formatted text, photos, feeds from other sources on the web and lots more. Because it allows real time concurrent editing, you can instantly see updates from others and therefore is well suited for quick messaging. You can also use the "playback" option to rewind the wave to see it’s history. When you log into Google Wave you'll be notified of new Waves which involve you, similar to new incoming emails. You can also use the "playback" option to rewind the wave to see it’s history at any time.
Some comments so far have been that it seems cluttered and confusing but that it also
looks like a platform that is aimed at moving into the social networking space – somewhere that seems to be getting more and more popular every year.
Google Wave was created in secret at Google's Sydney office over the past two years and was code named Walkabout.
Check out this video on the launch and a preview of Wave from Google and more info on Google Wave.
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