Back in May at Google I/O, Google revealed its next masterpiece, Google Wave, created by brother brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon out of Google’s Sydney, Australia offices. Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. “A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more” (About Wave). The Google Wave invention signifies Google’s determination to maintain its leading position in the Web 2.0 products/service development. This post illustrates 7 features that truly make Google Wave remarkable.
1. Real – Time Communication
Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time. For example, let’s say John Doe and I are having a conversation on Google Wave. As he starts typing a sentence, I can see his sentence character-by-character, and vice versa. While this looks like an Instant Messaging feature, it is what makes Wave a unique communication tool (live and real). However, if John Doe does not want me to see him typing, he can simply type in the “Draft” mode which will hide his words as he enters them.
Google Wave
2. Wiki – Style Collaboration
We are all familiar with Wikipedia. Google Wave allows anybody on the same wave to edit group messages. It works in a similar way just like people editing Wikipedia entries, except that Wave lets multiple users edit the same entry at the same time with bright colors highlighting the changes. Even better, the Playback feature allows Wave users to track in reverse order regarding what changes are made, how it is made and by whom.
3. Embeddable in Other Sites
In the demo at Google I/O conference (Scroll down to see the demo video), Lars and Stephanie illustrated how to embed Wave in a variety of sites. The demo indicated that a Wave client can be embedded in blogs or social networking sites such as Orkut.
By doing so, developers can benefit by “providing a rich media experience with a very little code,” according to Lars. For users, they can aggregate all the interesting blog discussions in their Wave API so that users don’t have to check back to different blogs so many times. As we see here, the “Embed” feature does make the sharing process much easier.
4. Natural language tools
Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction. In other words, the Wave platform can correct your spellings based on the specific language context. See the below video for demonstrations.
5. Rosy Translation Robot
Rosy is a real-time automatic translation robot, built on top of Wave and Google Translate, enabling real-time, multilingual, collaborative communication. When I was watching the demo, this translation robot just blew me away. For example, if you type English to a person from France who can’t speak English, your English will be automatically translated into French by Rosy in an instant. Please see the following video for a demo.
6. The Ability to Work with Twitter
Twave is a Wave gadget that enables you to tweet from within Google Wave. In other words, you can respond tweets directly on your Wave UI and the tweets will eventually go back to your Twitter stream. What’s even more impressive is the search feature that comes with Twave, which enables you to search Twitter in real time and get live update.
7. Open Source
Google plans to open source Wave. The purpose of doing so is to give developers the flexibility to adopt Wave, report bugs, correct code, and eventually build their own Wave gadgets, extensions, etc. At the end of the demo at Google I/O, Lars specifically emphasized the role that developers played for building Google Maps back in 2005. Apparently, the Google team wants the developers to be the driving force in developing Google Wave.
How Well Will Google Wave Do?
Although the 7 reasons mentioned above are seemingly sufficient to make Google Wave a massive success, I am concerned – “What if there just weren’t enough early adopters?” You’ve certainly heard the old saw of network theory: One fax machine is worth nothing as it can talk to nothing, two are worth twice as much, and connecting millions of fax machines makes each one worth exponentially more. The same principle applies to Google Wave.
Google has announced to send out 100,000 invites to the end users by September 30. While the expectations are high, how good Google Wave can really do still remains to be seen. What do you think about Google Wave?
