Google Wave Details

About Google Wave

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video.


Here's a preview of just some of the aspects of this new tool.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/images/ss1.gif

What is a wave?

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.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/images/ss2.gif

Some key technologies in Google Wave

Real-time collaboration

Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/images/ss3.gif

Watch the tech video

Natural language tools

Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/images/ss4.gif

Watch the tech video

Extending Google Wave

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/images/ss5.gif

Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets, thanks to Google Wave APIs.

So why go public now, with so much yet to be accomplished? The brothers Rasmussen have heard the shouts of "vaporware," and actually chose the opposite launch strategy for the product that launched their Google careers: Google Maps wasn't unveiled until it was complete.

The difference with Wave is that Google believes developer feedback is crucial to its evolution as a product. "We wanted to get people thinking about how we're going to use it and what people are going to use it for," Lars said.

For now, however, Wave is carefully labeled as a "developer preview," a status that doesn't even rise to the level of one of Google's ubiquitous beta projects. While Google still has no formal process for determining what projects are previews as opposed to betas as opposed to full-blown products, the goal for Wave is reduce the number of crashes to less than 1 percent of all session starts, at which point the "beta" tag can be more confidently applied.

When introducing Wave in May, Google said it hoped to open the service up to the general public some time in 2009. That seems unlikely when viewing Wave in late July, but launching a product that has been hyped as much as Wave with anything even close to the number of bugs currently present would be a disaster.

Lars knows this. "Google can be a cushy place to work; we're not going to run out of payroll anytime soon. But we're putting a lot of pressure on ourselves."

Source: Cnet.com

From Official Google Blog:

A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Hi,

Thanks for nice post, i saw the full google demo video, its awesome. If you guys don't know, then this link http://code.google.com/apis/wave/ is very much interesting for the developers.

In the above you can:

1. Request Sandbox Access
2. Read the Wave Developer's Guide
3. Learn about Robots, Gadgets, and the Embed APIs

Enjoy !