Google Wave: the new way to communicate

Google has given a developer-preview of its new service called Google Wave. With the new service, Google is looking to change the way we use internet to communicate. Google Wave gives users the ability to work together on documents. Not only office documents, but also multimedia content like photo’s, video’s and audio. It is a way to combine e-mail, chat, photos and feeds from around the web and present it in a more collaborative environment than what we used to now.

All our content and information sources have become too segmented right now. Google Wave is, just like email, a protocol. With this protocol Google hopes it will eventually replace some of our uses for e-mail.

Google Wave is a communication platform what is exists of multiple different communication protocols and platforms what we use nowadays seperately. Wave will try to mix chat, instant messaging, documents in realtime. People can work realtime and together with documents, start a conversation and share and edit different media files.

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. (source: erwinvanlun)

It is too early to say anything about the layout, interface and how it will look like when it goes live. Therefore Google is looking for fresh and good ideas at the developer-preview as a set of API’s is available to developers. Google will offer the service as a cloud application and run it on its own servers, but there will also be the possibility to run and host it at any company’s server.

The service will not be available before the end of 2009. In the meanwhile Google is looking for more integration and apllications for Wave. It already has instant messaging with audio, video, rss feed, photo’s and the ability to combine webservices like Google Maps. It will also be available for business use.

You can read more about it here!

google wave screenshot