Google Wave: First Impressions

“Google Wave?  Never heard Stopping coumadin of it.”  You may Lexapro 20mg - 120 pills be saying Suprax 100mg - 30 pills this so Indocin 75mg - 90 pills let me give a brief explanation.  Google Wave is the newest web application from, you guessed it, Google.  In short, Google Wave is a new communication tool that combines the best of email, instant messaging, and other collaboration tools like wikis into one, powerful communication package.  Since I first heard about it I have been pretty excited to see it.  Go ahead, call me a nerd and get it out of the way.

The easiest way to think about Wave is like instant messaging and email put together in one interface.  You don’t have to switch between your messenger app and your email app.  Both are in a seamless interface.

Messages are displayed immediately to all users that have been invited to the wave who are actively viewing it.  The same messages will be available to users that aren’t present later on as well.  Because of this, Wave can be both real-time communication (instant messaging) and delayed communication (email).

It is also a powerful collaboration tool, which could be used effectively in the business world and casually.  For example, you want your friends to see and interact with that map you are looking at online to plan your trip.  Put the map into the wave you have going with your friends and all of you can interact with it, at the same time.

In email and instant messaging, once a message is sent it cannot be changed.  Not so with Wave.  Users in a wave can simultaneously edit or annotate any text that has been entered into that wave.  This creates an extremely flexible conversation where email or instant messaging is rigid.

Since things are editable, how can someone know what really went on in the discussion?  Enter the Playback function.  By clicking the playback button you get access to every iteration of the conversation starting at the beginning.  This includes all of the edits.  So someone coming in late can easily catch up by seeing exactly how the discussion came to be.

Communication doesn’t have to be all done through multi-user waves.  You can also ping someone or have a private one on one chat.  This can be done either outside the wave structure or inside another wave.

Another big advantage Wave has over its predecessors is robots.  Robots are little programs you can invite to your wave to perform certain functions.  For example, let’s say you are in wave with someone who doesn’t speak your language.  There is a robot that can translate for you as you type so that the other person can read in their language what you just said.  And that is only the beginning.  Some robots are games, some modify or moderate the wave in some way.  This is one of the things that I think will make Wave a very useful service when it is complete.

If you have read this far you are probably wondering how to get in on this action.  As of right now there aren’t many ways to since it is only open to people who received invites to this “preview”.  Google sent out invites to around 100,000 people and these people had a certain number of invites they could send out.  I was fortunate enough to get one from a friend.  Even though they are testing the service out on a small scale I am sure it will be open to all fairly soon.  For an application that is in the alpha stage of development it already looks good and works well.

Wave is all the ways you would normally communicate with people on the internet wrapped into one flexible and powerful package.   The question is will it be able to successfully replace the older technologies?  Personally, I hope so, but we will see.

Brian