Google Makes Waves with Wave
Audience members were recently blown away by the famed Rasmussen brothers at Google’s annual I/O developer’s conference when they unveiled their newest full-scale project, Wave. Lars and Jens Rasmussen earned fame (and a small fortune) when they sold what we all now know as Google Maps to the firm in 2005, and now they want to replace E-mail. No tool is more indispensable than E-mail; even in a world where social-networks are all-encompassing with their own proprietary “direct” or “private” messages, E-mail is still king. It’s also completely walled off from all the various social-networks as its own beast, a sort of underlying communications framework for the entirety of the Internet. Google wants to tear down that wall, and combine aspects of social-networks with the legacy E-mail we know today.
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.
It’s easy to see what all the fuss is about, with having E-mail, instant messaging, mapping, image-sharing, file-swapping, and just about any other activity all lumped into one glossy interface. It’s even more interesting when the real kicker sets in; Google Wave is not an application of the usual sort. Wave is an HTML5 application, meaning that, similar to Gmail, the entire thing is a web-based app. What does that mean for someone collaborating with a team on a project? It means that a user can drop his laptop in a puddle one minute, walk into Kinko’s the next, and continue working where he left off. The user’s project data is safe and sound on a far-off Google server. His team will be waiting for him when he connects from any system with a browser capable of HTML5, which all browsers will be by Wave’s release later this year. If none of that sells you, developers have already begun working with Wave API’s to tie-in nearly every social-network currently on the Web into Wave the day it releases.
If Google’s track-record means anything, Wave has every chance of revolutionizing the way many people work (and play) online. You can learn more about Wave and even see it in action at Google’s official portal.
Posted in Social Media Tools. Tags: app, applications, google, Social Networking, social-media, tools, wave
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