The Gmail (Google) vs. Hotmail (Microsoft) war continues; and this time Google has really stretched far into the lead. Google looked to the development team of the Rasmusen brothers, the creators of Google Maps to help them build Google Wave. At the Google IO Convention, Lars Rasmusen gave a sneak peak to the new open sourced, personal online communication and collaboration tool. It is a web hosted email system like Gmail or Hotmail that promises to extend beyond the current limitations of traditional emailing. Google Wave was introduced first to developers to aggregate assistance in discovering bugs and developing new extensions to enhance its functionalities.
As Lars explained, emailing was thought of 40 years ago; they based the foundation of Google Wave to reflect how email would work if it were created today. Traditionally an email is created from one source then sent out to one or multiple recipients. Each recipient has to wait to receive the email to reply and then it goes back to the originator. With Google Wave, the email message source will be thought of as one discussion started by someone that will be hosted online and accessed by everyone you would like to have in the conversation online. It allows emails to be seen in real time making it a mix between email and instant messaging.
To create a message, you start a new “wave”. You type in what looks like a regular email, enter a subject, and it spell checks as you write similar to a spellchecker in your mobile phone. This is no ordinary spell checker. It actually takes the context of the sentence into consideration making it much more sophisticated. No more missing words that are spelled correctly but are used incorrectly. You can easily drag and drop contacts to the message and it allows you to keep track of the message structure. A new person who is added or joins the wave later can use a cool new playback tool that gives you a play by play of who wrote what and when. You could also add character styling in real time with the live concurrent editing and it will support writing in right to left languages like Hebrew.
Other neat features include creating a new thread and addressing certain parts of a wave. Many times when someone writes an email, they will talk about different things in one message. You could create a thread on a single aspect and others could join the thread as well. Messages on threads have options not to be seen by certain users for privacy similar to a blind carbon copy function in traditional email. What sets Google Wave apart is the instant messaging type capability. It has the capability to transmit each character that is typed by the other person live. This dramatically helps to speed up a conversation however, if you want privacy about what characters you are writing before sending the final message, you can choose to do so with a privacy setting.
Adding attachments on Google Wave is a breeze with a drag and drop feature. Attachments could be dragged directly from your desktop to the wave and it will immediately show on the other persons screen. However, there are gears that need to be uploaded for this to work, something that Google is currently working on. You could drag and drop photos and edit captions … then create a group photo album as well. It brings a social functionality because everyone in your office could be included to see the photo album. To organize your waves you can create folders and use tags for searching.
Now for the really cool things you could do! You can do a Google search while writing an email, yes, there is a built-in search bar allowing you to search from the Wave interface. Want to create a group poll or organize an event? Use the Yes-No-Maybe gadget; it’s an extension that was created that allows you to organize an event. Guests could drag and drop what column they want to be in, Yes, No, or Maybe. The results are live. Google Wave even allows you to play collaborative games with other Wave users. You could play back the game to see the start to finish.
Wave could be used to enhance your website. You could add a blog to the Wave interface, probably via Blogger. You could respond live to a blog comment directly from your Wave interface or easily embed a wave into a blog by dragging and dropping as well. Have discussions and simultaneous editing and collaboration on documents between users. If edits have been made to an original discussion or document, when the document is opened, the markups are highlighted. A description on top will say who made the edits. Also, with the playback button, you could see how the original document started and you can toggle for pausing and play forward. It also has the capability to recognize links and what kind of links they are; Like a YouTube video will give you the option to embed the actual video.
Wave will also be available for mobile devices, like Google’s Android phone and the IPhone. An awesome feature is Wave’s capability with Twitter. To create a TWAVE (wave of tweets), you just log in to Twitter from Wave and you will see tweets the same way you do on Twitter. You can respond to someone’s tweet directly from Wave and make an instant @reply.
Even in its early stages, it’s easy to see that Google really has created an innovative new communication system. They made it easy for developers to create extensions for interface customization which will lead to appealing extensions of Google Wave. I’m very excited to use this new tool once it is released. For more information on Google Wave visit wave.google.com.
July 29, 2009
