Google Wave Product – New Communication

A new communication tool that Google is developing to use on your computer systems and mobile devices. It is not  expected to be available to the public for several months but has been put into the hands of developers now to see what they can do with it before it's public release. A very nice overview is available on YouTube and can be accessed from cnet news Webware site.

Supports standard email functions as well as instant messaging. It treats the communication as an object so that it can be real time as well as providing standard email type access. It allows easy drag and drop capability to add people to the communication flow and to bring people in on the conversation at any point. You can easily put threads into the message, share the communication on a blog by adding the blog as a member of the conversation and withhold access to parts of the communication thread by making them private and assign the members to just that portion of the conversation thread. Also if you are added after the conversation thread had started you have the ability to replay the conversation as it progressed, piece by  piece.

They discussed how using this product you can use the editing function to collaborate on document creation. It again allows you to show the changes, but the most interesting thing is that it allows you to view the comments, and playback the order in which the document was worked on. It makes editing and revision control very well controlled. It promises “to become a very powerful document creation tool!”

A Linking function allows you to connect multiple Wave Conversations into lists. This allows you to bring together multiple conversations threads in groups to categorize them and make them easier to access as a group. They describe it as “very Wiki Like.” You group these conversation links by dragging them onto a new Wave Conversation and creating a Wave Conversation about previous Wave Conversations.

You have the ability to use search criteria to search your conversations for information very quickly and in real time as documents and messages are being created.

It is using a very strong context sensitive spell checker that they are providing API’s so that other developers can use them in their applications. The entire application lends itself to having developers create add-ins or gadget tools that create a richer set of functions to the application. Wave allows the developer to use extensions to connect to other communications applications as well. They demonstrated the interface with Twitter which connects your Twitter account with your Wave account and allows for instantaneous communication between the two product applications. They showed some other integration capabilities with an issue tracker application that allows you work within Wave and to have the updates automatically update in the issue tracker program as well.

Because Google and the Wave Project are providing the Wave product as an open API other companies can build their own Wave Systems and host their own Wave Servers that can interact with Google’s and other systems. Each of these Private Wave servers remain private and only the shared communications traverse between the two applications. Because of this you could implement your own internal Wave Server and host it on your equipment and have a private installation being used within your company and still have it have the ability to communicate with external systems as well.

Last but not least they showed an online translation robot that allows you communicate very easily in languages that you don’t know and be able to do so effectively.