Google Wave's inbox, as seen on the Official Google Blog. ((Courtesy Google)) In May, Google announced Wave, the company's attempt to reinvent internet communication. Brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the Australian creators of Google Maps, have been working on the project for the last two years.
On Sept. 30, Google opened its preview of Wave beyond the 6,000 or so software developers who are currently helping to build the service. About 100,000 users can now see what Wave is all about.
Google Wave incorporates ideas from email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis and bulletin boards into a single new method of communicating. But we already have email, IM, wikis and the rest, so why do we need one tool that does all of these things? What is new in Google Wave?
How old is email? The online tools you use every day might be older than you think. (Like everything on the internet, the date of origin of these tools is up for debate.) Email/instant messaging: 1965 Bulletin Board Systems: 1978 Newsgroups: 1979 Internet: 1983 World Wide Web: 1989 Search engines: 1990 Web browsers: 1991 Wikis: 1995 VoIP: 1995 Blogs: 1997 Social networking sites: 1997 Microblogs (e.g. Twitter): 2006
Live editing by multiple users
In their first demo of Wave at the Google I/O conference, the project's lead engineer, Lars Rasmussen, and project manager Stephanie Hannon demonstrated how a conversation that starts out looking like an email, with replies going back and forth, can turn seamlessly into an instant messaging conversation if more than one person has the wave open at the same time.
Actually, the conversation is even more instant than instant messaging. Each key stroke by every participant in the wave is visible to all the others as it occurs. Rasmussen said this would result in faster communication than IM because you wouldn't be spending half the conversation waiting for the other person to hit "Enter."
However, he seemed to recognize that not everyone would want to communicate in this way, and said that a wave's settings could be changed so that messages are only sent after the user hits "Enter."
This live communication isn't limited to IM-type conversations. Anything in a wave can be edited by anyone who's been invited into it, including the original message. In the demo, colour-coded cursors, labelled with their owners' names, race around a document, all making changes simultaneously.
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