News
Archive of all the latest news and blog posts
Google Wave: First Impressions
No web based product or service since GMail has received as much hype as Google Wave. Google’s new all singing all dancing, mail capable, instant messaging real-time user collaboration platform. But what is it and is it actually any good? The buzz seems to be that this is the service that will eventually displace GMail itself. Today we take a look at what makes Google Wave unique and look at some of the features that may enable this to become the next big thing ion the web.
If you are a follower of the web and have an interest in the latest technologies, you will probably have heard some rumblings about this enigmatic new platform called Google Wave. An early beta version has been available to developers since May and we wrote a blog called ‘Google Wave For Dummies’ round about the same time. Over the past few weeks Google has been starting to distribute invitations and the ball is well and truly rolling. Demand for invites is seemingly at a premium as some people attempt to sell them through Ebay, making Google Wave the most eagerly anticipated social media product of 2010. As one of the lucky few to receive an invite (I have 11 additional invites if anyone is interested), I have spent the last few weeks attempting to navigate this intriguing yet confusing new technology platform.
The infamous Rasmussen brothers have led the Google Wave project, the same guys who were responsible for developing Google Maps. Early speculation suggested this product would never reach the market, as Google has developed a slight reputation for half baking new products and jumping on the next fashionable technology bandwagon. Remember Google Lively anyone? So is Google Wave likely to incite a tsunami of interest and steadily displace our beloved GMail, or will the platform simply crash and burn upon the jagged rocks of indifference and scepticism.
Lars Rasmussen, Googles lead software manager, suggested that Google Wave is what email would look like had it been invented today. He also indicated that email was invented some 40 years ago, long before the earliest incarnation of the World Wide Web. Email was simply intended as an electronic version of traditional snail mail, whilst instant messaging has become a text based version of the modern phone call. Things have become more complex with the introduction of numerous web based ‘widgets’ such as discussion forums, blogs and bulletin boards as means of web based communication.
Simply put, Google Wave appears to be a real-time collaboration platform that fuses the functionality of email with instant messaging. Providing the user with the ability to collaborate with one or many individuals in successive ‘waves’ of communication. In traditional Google style, it is a technology that works purely in the web browser using HTML5 code and works best in Chrome, safari and Firefox.
A collaboration platform like Google Wave requires a critical mass of people in order to explore the full potential of the features and functionality. The current problem is that very few people have invites and in order to collaborate there needs to be more activity. It seems that very much like GMail, it’s a technology that should sit open in your browser all day whilst you are at work. Google has to try and manage the growth of the service ion a very delicate manner. If they release too many invites in a shirt space of time, the system will crash as there are still numerous bugs to be ironed out. If they fail to release enough invites, people will lose interest quickly and the service may never take off. One of the cool features is that you can have multiple people communicating literally in real-time during an instant messaging conversation. This means that as the other user types, you can see exactly what they are typing as it happens. This enables you to see how reliant your peers and colleagues are upon using spell checkers and the actual thought process they go through when constructing a sentence. The phrase ‘think before you type’ springs to mind.
Log in to Facebook to post your comment
