Say Hello to Google Wave!

Yesterday at the Google I/O keynote, the search giant unveils a developer preview of Google Wave "the e-mail of the future". Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It is an attempt to "combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication," said Lars Rasmussen, who launched the project with his brother Jens after Google acquired their mapping start-up in 2004. Wave was inspired by the most commonly used Internet communication technologies: email + instant messaging.


As a platform, developers can create applications that run within a wave, similar to how developers have used Facebook as a platform to create all sorts of applications. Some key technologies in Google Wave are Real-time collaboration, contextual suggestions and spelling correction, and embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets.

Here some definition grabbed from Google :

What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.


Google envisions three types of developer projects using Wave. First using it as a gateway for conversations like the Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, blogs, and other social media sites. The Wave team created a gadget for twitter that they call "Twave" that brings in tweets from your stream.

Second as a platform to create applications within Wave and last but not the least, to integrate wave to enterprise system such as bug tracking tool within the company which was used as example by Rasmussen during the Google I/O.



Google Wave is based on a open protocol, so anyone can build their own wave system.

For more Technology news, subscribe now.