Are You Riding the Google Wave?
Google describes the Wave as “how e-mail would look if it were invented today”, and claims it will transform how people communicate online. GoogleWave is an online communication and collaboration tool that combines e-mail, instant messaging and wiki-style editing. “It struck us that e-mail is still the main communication tool on the web, which seemed remarkable given that it is 20-year-old technology,” said Lars Rasmussen, who along with his brother was the developer of Google Maps as well. Wave seems to be a combination of Instant Messenger and Facebook like social media interactions. What it primarily does is allow users to share, ongoing, real-time conversations called Waves. All the participants in a wave can add more participants, but participants can also send private replies to each other. It differs from traditional instant messenger (IM) in that the conversation can continue even once everyone has logged out. Also those invited to a Wave conversation but not currently online, can then later read the message strand. There are some irritating functions like real-time typing so that fellow wavers can view a comment being written character by character. Thankfully they are working on it being an optional mode. Additionally there are wiki-style editing tools that allows for messages to be edited at any point by members of the conversation and a Playback facility so that people can see exactly who has edited what and at what time. There are also authoring tools like automatic spelling corrections, inline editing and change tracking. If you find it painful and time consuming to upload photos in other applications like Facebook, you will appreciate the fact that here photos can simply be dragged from the desktop onto the Wave platform . Also the tool incorporates popular social media games like as sudoku and chess. I’m sure there are more to come. The only problem that Google Wave faces is that it can run on almost all browsers with the exception of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which is currently the most used browser. Users of IE will have to download a plug-in, known as Chrome Frame to use the application. It remains to be seen if Google can persuade IE users to go to the trouble of doing so. Since Wave was announced at a Google developers’ conference in May, one million people have registered on the site. Wave will have a full consumer launch early next year.
As of now Google is sending out 100,000 invites to test drive the Wave, each of whom can further nominate five people to “join the Wave”. Let us know if you enjoyed the ride if you happen to be on the party list.
