Google Wave

August 31, 2009 · Print This Article

Individuals engage in “hosted communications” called waves. Waves can consist of any combination of conversations (such as email and IM) and documents (collaboration), providing rich interaction via text, photos, videos, maps, and more, according to Google. If you think of how an email thread and an IM conversation might be combined into a single entity, that’s pretty much a wave. A playback capability lets participants “rewind” the wave at any point and review what’s already happened. You can edit any part of the wave at any time, and it’s always possible to see who did what. Some Wave capabilities Google has highlighted so far include realtime collaboration, natural language tools (including context-sensitive spell checking), and Google Wave’s extensibility model, which lets third-party developers add gadgets to the platform and embed waves in other sites.

Google Wave runs completely in the browser. It’s based on HTML 5 and Google Web Toolkit, and its basic layout is similar to Microsoft Outlook’s. It features a multi-pane (“panel” to Google) interface with Navigation (“folders” like Inbox) and Contacts panes on the left, the selected folder in the middle (which Google calls the Search panel), and, on the right, the selected wave (the message, in an email application). Similarity to Outlook and other email applications was no doubt intentional, to help users make the transition to this new communications and collaboration model. When you create a new wave, you typically start as you would with an email message, by typing a message (as contrasted with an IM where you select a contact or group of contacts first). You can then add users—or participants, as Wave calls them—using a pop-up window.
To users participating in a wave, the experience is very much like email. You hit Reply to write your response. This can happen offline, where the conversation is conducted like a long-distance chess match via email. But waves go beyond email by providing for live, interactive conversations—like IM—and by providing more granular ways to
converse. With IM, you can typically see that the other participant is typing a message (because it will say something like “Rafael is typing…”) but you don’t see the message as its being typed. With Wave, you do. In the future you’ll be able to drag and drop multimedia content, like pictures and video, into a wave. This feature isn’t supported by the
HTML 5 standard, so Google is working to get it added. You’ll also be able to embed a wave in a traditional web site, to
allow others to participate in a conversation from the web, adding their own comments and replies. (You can also just create waves from these sites and forego the Wave web app entirely if you want.)

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