Google have launched a personal communication and collaboration tool called Google Wave – all web based and open source of course. Its primary goal is to make collaboration more efficient and easier – Looks like it could be a real competitor for Outlook, Office and SharePoint. I can’t wait to get the invite to try this stuff out if I get a developer preview hint, hint Google (John.Brookmyre@EMC.com).
Here is a talk by Vic Gundotra (Vice President Engineering) and some of the Wave Team introducing the tool including Jens and Lars Rasmussen (of Maps fame), Stephanie Hannon and others:
The video is over 1hr 20 mins long but here are the key points:
| Premise | 05:30 |
| Demo | 07:37 |
| API | 18:20 |
| Document Sharing | 30:00 (ish) |
| Organisation (tags) | 40:12 |
| Extensions | 43:20 |
| Efficiency Benefits | 49:05 |
| Games and more extensions | 51:00 |
| Extensions with existing workflow | 1:01:50 |
| Protocol | 1:06:05 |
| Language translator | 1:12:00 |
The premise behind this is - What would email look like if it was invented today? Based on all the knowledge and tools that we have today (wikis, bulletin boards, collaborations, IM…) it would have been done differently, it would look like this.
Some of the benefits:
- Email and chat can be done seamlessly
- Discussion and content in one tool (blurring emails and wikis etc together)
- Chat can be live (no more waiting seeing - “<User> is entering text”) - This is all web browser based (HTML 5)
- Play back to the see the history of the Wave - historic messages / Waves (even if you are added later) - This is all web browser based (HTML 5)
- Private messages within Waves – a tree structure of messages
- Spell check – with contextual checking against a language model based on the Internet! Can I have some bean soup? It has been so long - This is all web browser based (HTML 5)
- Drag and drop attachments onto the Wave with thumbnails showing before the files are copied - This is all web browser based (HTML 5 + Gears)
- Advanced collaborative with blogs functionality – updates and comments
- Source control inspired sharing and collaboration to work on sections of documents
- Collaborative editing - Multi-user simultaneous editing
- Multi language support and language translator!!!
- Drag and drop Wave links (Wiki-esque behaviour)
- API to change behaviour and extend such as embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets
- Gadgets / Extensions and Robots to extend the functionality
- Built on the Google Web Toolkit
- Extensions can add Twitter or other 3rd parties through the APIs (TWaves for Twitter)
- Federation – open source / open system
- Google Wave Federation Protocol which is the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers
- This is all web browser based (HTML 5)
For more info on the Wave check out these links:
There is a Q&A session here too (video at the bottom – not great quality).
I can’t wait to get the invite to try this stuff out with a developer preview (John.Brookmyre@EMC.com).
Any comments or opinions would be much appreciated,
John