Google Wave

Google Wave

Google wave is a cool piece of technology that centers around live and concurrent editing and workflow management. What this translates into is a personal collaboration and communication tool that is fun, and perhaps an extremely powerful a platform that can be used in many different ways. Now, there is an hour and a half long presentation available on the Google wave web site. But without going through it for you to get an idea of what wave is lets put forth this analogy. Think of a blank canvas. You and a bunch of other folks are simultaneously working on it. But you’re not just using paint and brushes. Instead, you have a multitude of tools at your disposal such as videos, pictures, maps and so on that you can pin up to the canvas to better present your point. And all this happens in real time. Say one of your fellow ‘artists’ leaves. He or she can come back and rewind and playback the flow of work to see what was missed. Okay now lets get down to the real world. Your canvas is actually based in HTML5 and can be run in several of today’s browsers. To speed up communication and give added functionality it features a spell checker that auto corrects on the fly. The spell checker draws on a huge contextual linguistic model, so it knows the context of words being used and corrects them appropriately. The interface consists of panels which they call – you guessed it – waves. These waves contain conversations that can be edited in real time! Forget about hand picking text to first quote and then reply. You can just pin up your response to any part of the original communication. What you’re typing gets bounced off a server straight to the other recipients of participants of the wave. If you wish to add new participants to a wave its as simple as dragging their picture from a contacts panel on the left.

All this free for all communication might just not go down well with those who are a little reticent. That’s one of the first things that comes to mind when you watch the wave presentation; “hey I don’t want people to see what I’m typing while I’m composing a mail”. Understandable. And the developers of Wave are not unmindful of that. They’ve incorporated a feature that hides you from the rest of the Wave. Perhaps the best thing about wave is that it can be embedded on other sites. Another interesting feature of wave is that discussion and content collaboration can be done on documents in the same tool i.e. wave. So you don’t have to follow the traditional Wiki and document format.

Wave is open source. That means that developers will get their hands on a set of external APIs with which they can build widgets for wave (which they call extensions) and even discover better ways of using its functionality. App developers only have to worry about coding XML on the client side and the server takes care of updating over the wire. Collaborative games are also on the drawing board amongst other things. There is also the scope of developing server side extensions using bots. Google demoed one such bot “Rosy” that can translate 40 languages on the fly! Since Google is keeping the much of the code open source, other corporations are free to come up with their own deployments of the wave system. By the time Wave formally launches, in a year, it might very well become a refined and extremely powerful tool. We’re eagerly waiting.