The lazy Sunday gave me the chance to watch the 1hr+ videocast of the developer preview for Google Wave, given at the Google I/O. It is a highly integrating toolkit for communication and collaboration (instant and sequential) running on the web. Highly integrated means, that while I’m writing this post, someone else could help me editing it by writing, posting images, …
Wave is planned to be released later this year and defines one of the missing links between mail, instant messaging, blogging, wikiing, twittering,… Using the Google Wave API you can built robot extensions to automate tasks, integrate multi-user-interaction into webservices and embed collaborative features to webservices by dropping in a wave. Wave can be a milestone towards social web services in private life and business. And – it’s another reason for many of us to switch communication to google. Why do I think the wave can grow big? Wave provides improvement in communication in multiple ways:
- It’s not just CC/BCC – it’s multi-user-communication
- It’s realtime – You see the others keystrokes while working on a shared document
- It comes with a playback feature. A complete track of multiple persons communication history. I often wished I had one, searching through hundreds of mails
- It offers an open API so you can use your own brain to invent, integrate helpers, robots, third-party-services
Intuity’s clients and partners already dropped an eye on waves. I think it’s worth to dig into the API and get a closer look.
b.t.w. I like the logo. Joshua wrote a critique and opened discussion.
Could be a giant leap in communication. We’ll see what happens during the next months.
There’s also an interesting on review the Solid State Group Tech Blog. It features a very interesting questions that Google needs to answer: “How is this going to be explained to mom and dad?”
Google is quiet good at communicating to developers and getting them crazy about new products but what about the followers like my mom? How can you explain to them what a wave actually is?
My guess is: Maybe Google doens’t have to explain so much. Because the innovators and the beta testers will spread the word and do most of the marketing for Google.