What is Google Wave?
Posted by lemiffe in Communication, Computers, Internet on Sep 30th, 2009 | 1 comment
So, you might have heard a lot of talk/posts going around lately referring to Google Wave. So what is this “Google Wave” everyone is talking about?
It is a beta service from Google, hosted at http://wave.google.com, which currently is only available to 100,000 people. Those people are having their invitations sent to them by Google as a preview of the service. It is expected that the service will go live in X amount of time, possibly after they have determined that the system presents a low rate of bugs, and can hold up to the excessive demand on their servers (We don’t wait it dying like Gmail, do we now?).
According to Google Wave’s short about page, a Wave is the following:
- A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
- A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
- A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
However, Wikipedia goes on to explain a little more in depth what Google Wave is:
- Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.
So I hope this has cleared any confusion as to what the service is, what we can expect from it, and how reliable it is going to be. We all have our fingers crossed that it will turn out to be what we expected (and that it wont fall down as much as Gmail).
Related posts:
Gwave -as I like to call it lol- is (as google states) both a conversation AND a document.
In the other hand, I wonder if Google should be releasing new products instead of improving the ones they already have going on, like Gfail, I mean, Gmail.
Those are my two cents.