Google Wave
14/10/2009
Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. It aims to change the way we communicate with one another. It aims to be a new way of communicating, different or at a higher level than email.
Wave is a structured conversation, living in one place, which means you can edit inside the document, not simply adding replies as in email.
Wave sends character in real time, which gets rid of the “xx is typing” which is typical of current messenger tools
Wave allows you to invite others to join the conversation. For long complicated conversations you can ‘replay’ which allows you to see how the conversation built up. The word used for this within Google Wave is ‘playback’, taking the concept from video clips.
But for conversations between many people you may want to send ‘private replies’ to a subset of the conversation. This is possible with Google Wave.
But a wave is designed for multi-editing; many people can edit the wave at the same time. This is done because the characters are transmitted one by one in real time.
Google Wave is for all types of media, so text can be shared, but also images. Simply adding images into the document by drag and drop they can be seen by all others in the Wave. Sharing photos with others is likely to be a huge benefit of Wave. Photos and text can be moved between Waves.
Whereas the original Internet applications started with English and were very slow to be usable with different character sets, the Google wave is designed from the start for Chinese or Arabic or any other different character set to be used.
Google is a collaboration tool; because Wave allows you to edit the conversation it can be used to collaborate on a document, and it has powerful track changes. It is this track change facility or audit trail that makes it possible to allow authorship to anyone.
Waves can also be used as the organisation structure for other waves. This is quite different from ‘files and folders’ where folders are used to categorise different files.
Google Wave API
These are being developed following the success of the Google Maps API. Cornish WebServices use the Google maps API to implement map functionality within websites, and we intend to offer Google Wave integration into websites we develop in the future.
Google Wave API will allow the whole Wave to be embedded within a website or blog. Replies can be entered either via the website, or via the Wave client. It can also be embedded on mobile devices.
The wave spell checker is context sensitive, dealing with words that are spelt different in different contexts. It uses the same principle for link checking, ensuring the link is correctly formatted for a link.
Client side extensions can be developed for the wave. The wave technology allows many users to see this being updated at the same time.
