In case you haven’t heard, Google has a new toy in the works set to launch later this year: Google Wave.
And just as they wowed the world with Google Maps and their oh-so-simple Gmail service, Google Wave will revolutionize the way we communicate and collaborate on the web forever.
It’s that amazing.
Google Wave’s simplicity is its deceptive strength.
Its website states, Wave is “equal parts conversation and document.”
As its name suggests, users create things called “waves” where text, images and videos can be added and edited.
Big whoop, right? Most collaborative document applications can do that now (sometimes sans-video).
Google Wave, however, works in real-time. Not faux real-time like instant messengers in which you type, wait for a response, read the response, and type again.
As soon as a user presses a key, Wave updates the document so all users will literally see the writer making real-time changes.
It’s like AIM or Facebook chat but with no downtime.
The best part is, Google Wave is run entirely in the browser, which means is that you can use all the benefits of Wave straight from Firefox, Safari, or any other browser without having to download a program.
If a computer has an up-to-date browser, it can run Google Wave.
But Wave isn’t just for collaboratively filing weekly TPS reports or copy editing newspaper articles.
No, that’s far too droll. Wave will be open-source, allowing developers to create APIs, gadgets, widgets and all other sorts of other doo-dads that harness the dynamic power of Google Wave.
An example from Google Wave’s press release video of a fun extension is real-time Sudoku.
A user creates a Wave containing the Sudoku game and invites others to play.
Players then compete against each other to solve the most squares the fastest with mistakes costing negative points.
It’s fun, it’s simple, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg for what Wave can offer.
A chess game was also shown off. Players could view the history of the game by rewinding moves, just as any wave can be “rewound” to view previous edits.
Possibly most impressive is the implementation of bots in Waves.
Using a bot called Bloggy, the contents of a Wave are updated to a blog in real-time.
Readers of the blog can also converse with the author through a Wave placed on the site.
A bot called Rosy instantly translates languages between users in a wave.
Google’s example consisted of a conversation in French and English.
As the English speaker wrote, the sentence would be translated word-by-word into French on the other user’s screen.
As the French speaker replied, her sentence was translated into surprisingly well-structured English.
Google Wave is destined to be the next big thing in online conversation and collaboration.
Group projects will be exponentially easier thanks to its editing abilities.
Blogs can be updated and edited seamlessly through the same tool you’re using to talk to your friend overseas in England.
Just as the iPhone became the “JesusPhone” of the mobile world, so too will Google
Wave become the god-like tool everyone will rely on just as much as they do e-mail today.
Wave is such an all-encompassing tool it’s impossible to explain all of its features in such a tiny space.
If your interest has been piqued, check out the video at http://wave.google.com and sign up for the newsletter with updates and release date information.
It may take a while to catch on, but I bet in a year or so, Google Wave will be the thing for everyone to use, whether for instant messaging, editing, or blog posting.
Interested in learning more about Google Wave? Visit the main website here.
The Wave won’t make as big a splash as you say until it gets cleaned up… I wonder if it is just trying to do too much and yet it doesn’t do anything truly well! There are too many leading tools that do many of the tasks included in Wave better.
I think everyone should have heard about Google Wave by now!
Online collaborating and teaching can work, If you have trust and the right tools.
I recently tried http://www.showdocument.com – good app for uploading documents and working on them in real-time.
Most file types are supported and it needs no installation. – andy