Google Wave Logo

Everyday we surf the web to explore new things which are happening on the web and once in a while we do come across things that really make us interested. First it was Microsoft’s Big Bang with “Bing” and now it is Google’s turn to create wave with their new product “Google Wave”.

Google unveiled “Waves” at Google I/O, which is Google’s web developer focused conference. It was presented in front of 4000 strong developer community and the success of the event can be gauged that by the end of the conversation all of them were completely mesmerized and gave it a long and hard applause. All the developers present were provided with the credentials of demo account for which they will be submitting their feedbacks. I wish we could have been there and have a sneak into the live demo! We have already applied to Google for a Developer Preview and hope they will oblige. The product would be officially launched by around the end of this year.

Getting to the details now, Google Wave is a communication and collaboration tool which will be an integrated web service merging e-mail, instant messaging, wiki and social networking on a single platform. It comes with some really cool APIs which will enable anyone and everyone to build their own wave system. Google Wave is actually a three dimensional entity which they call 3P’s of Google. They are Product, Platform and Protocol

Google Wave

The name “Wave” is inspired by the Firefly television series in which Wave is an electronic communication mode. Google Wave is supposedly the next big thing in electronic communication mode. It is being talked about as the next generation e-mail. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages.

One of the main features associated with Google Wave is that it is a hosted conversation. Let me clear this a bit for you. Suppose you are in a conversation with someone via e-mail. You send the messages, receive the replies and the same is happening at the other end too. Now let’s suppose you have exchanged 3-4 messages with the other person and want to add something to the 2nd message. As for now you will have to copy the second message, quote it and then send it. But with Google Wave you need to simply select the last word from the sentence for which you want to reply back and tell the server via an option on the right hand side to split the message and insert the reply. It is also known as inline reply. This makes it incredibly easy for the user to maintain proper structure and the context too of the communication being done on a regular basis. Further, the updated conversation will be highlighted to let the other person know about latest additions in the conversation. Take a look at the snapshot below to get more idea about this

Conversation in Google Wave

Moreover, the content being posted is fully editable. Any of the persons involved in the conversation can edit it. The edited part is highlighted for others to take note of the changes.

The other feature of this real time conversation is that it’s truly real time. You don’t need to hit the “Done” button” to transmit the message. As the user types the message, the other user can see it character by character. This feature is really advantageous as we spend half of our time waiting for the other person to reply and it’s terrible to see “user_name is typing”. Via this feature we can formulate our replies beforehand and we end up utilizing 100% of our conversation time. There is an option to disable this feature in case you don’t want the other person to see the message you are writing in Real-Time. This means, e-mail conversation and instant messaging conversation do not require two separate tools or platforms.

The other important feature comes into play when you want to add a third person in your conversation. It is quite simple to do so. Just drag and drop the user to the wave and he becomes a part of the conversation. You might think that, in this case how he will know about the conversation which took place prior to his joining in. It’s fairly simple. There is a “Playback” button which plays back the whole conversation between the other two users. Also, there is an option of “Secret Reply” which can be used in case you don’t want to involve the third person. E.g. If A,B and C are in the conversation and it’s B’s birthday, then A and C can use the secret reply option to exchange their secret birthday plans and maintain the surprise without involving B. That’s fairly nice.

Now let’s talk about the attachments. Sometimes they are very important when you want to exchange photographs, documents or other files. In the Present Scenario, we click on an “Attachment” button, browse to the specific directory where the file is kept, select it and hit the “Attach” button. With Google Wave you just need to drag and drop the files to your wave and they will be uploaded in no time and will be visible to other users as you drop them into your wave, again in the real time (similar to typing specified above). Not only this, you can also edit the caption of the image on your wave and it will be displayed across all the waves which are connected to yours.

Another marvelous feature of Google Wave is its capability to integrate blogs, social networks, discussion forums and other public places within it via an API. This enables the wave to be displayed across all these platforms and make the changes or new additions visible on them. What makes it more interesting is that it is fully compatible on mobile devices. On the demo date, Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android were used to display the Wave’s compatibility and it turned out to be fully functional as well as compatible.

The beauty of Google Wave lies in the fact that majority of its code will be Open Source. Additionally, Google will allow developers like us to build our own Wave services.

Google Wave is definitely a product to reckon with. It is an unbelievable and powerful demonstration of what is possible in a browser. The product is really magical, after all the engineering leadership behind it is of two brothers at Google who were the force behind another magical application i.e. Google Maps. Google Wave was created using Google Web Toolkit and is currently still in the development process. At present, it is available in a developer preview for sandbox access. As developers we are very excited on its demo launch and are eagerly waiting to get the real taste of it.

The whole idea started with the fact that Email as an invention is around 40 years old and primarily its form hasn’t changed. Engineers at Google thought, what would happen if email was invented today and that formed the basis of Google Wave.  To view a Demo of Google Wave please click here.