It’s unlikely you will have escaped the hoopla and hype recently over Google Wave. It’s top trended on Twitter and even knocked Bing off the top of the tech news lists (even on Bing!). The initial batch of 100,000 invitations sent out by Google to Internet users wishing to trial a beta version landed in lucky inboxes at the tail end of September.

Google are talking big. They believe that Wave offers a ground-up reinvention of the way that people communicate and collaborate online. Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen, defined Wave as “A single shared space where two or more users can exchange real time dialogue, photos, videos, maps and documents in what we call a Wave. Everyone can reply to a Wave, people can come and go and you can drag and drop information from all over the web.”

Superficially resembling email, the software is essentially an amalgamation of email, real time chat (you might already use the Gmail chat function) and micro-blogging type functionality all under one bonnet with search a focal point of its interface. Its searches are based on keywords, activity, history, person, and more that helps users manage their experience effectively. When it comes to storing wave conversations it’s done much in the same way as it is in email using folders like archived, starred, inbox, and trash.

Communications are based on Waves and though working in a similar way to email or IM, there is a great deal more flexibility with users able to edit the messages of anybody within your wave, much like a Wiki, with edits highlighted and attributed. Conversations are threaded and easier to follow. They are also richer in the sense that it is easy to drag and drop images and attachments as well as add new contributors. Perfect for collaborative work.

Google seems keen that Wave benefits from the full ingenuity and input of developers world wide and has made the system Open Source, also inviting developers to build extensions using open APIs. Robot Plugins and applications will enable a virtually unlimited range of features such as contextual spell checking and live translation. Tweety integration for example lets you sign in to Twitter, read tweets from your friends and post a new tweet directly from Wave – a Twave.

Of course at the moment the main interest in Waves is mainly within tech communities who are reviewing it, largely favourable in beta. The acid test will be whether the system proves useful enough to shift users from their existing tools. Whether it is adopted on a mass scale. Judging from Google’s popularity and its successes to date it would take a brave person to bet against them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Search Industry News, Social Media, Website Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.