Google early announces “Wave”
Update since my last post: This link to the Mashable article does a great job detailing the impact of Wave
Google teaches how to do marketing and generate buzz: yet again
Microsoft had announced the “Bing” (But It’s Not Google) only a few days back and has promised to spend 100M$ for advertising it. In contrast, Google’s announcement of the Wave, is quintessentially Google. Understated, dropped in as almost a “oh, by the way” on the second day of a developer conference. Since then, the whole world is abuzz, the “Tweeple” have made this one of the top trending topics and Bing has suddenly become less “trendy”. All this without spending a dime. Google has perfected this art of virtually zero-cost marketing. We saw this with GTalk and with Chrome as well.
What is the Google Wave?
Firstly, it is not available yet. Google “pre-announced” it just now with several months expected from now to actual launch. Till then, if you are a developer, you can play with it and help Google with development, bug-fixes and enahncements.
This is cloud-computing in full technicolor. Wave is (can they be allowed to get away with appropriating such a commonplace English word as a brand?:-) ) online collaboration and conversation all rolled into one. It allows the collaboration models to catch up with the technology state of the art. How?
A Wave can be a collaborative document; being given shape by many who can claim authorship and all of whom can edit, add or embed rich media, maps and even feeds from other sources on the web.
Part-Wiki, part Twitter, part YouTube, part Google Docs? Or, a giant mashup of all the killer apps on the internet today?
Create a wave: (Go to the official Google Blogs for a full and updated description)
Anyone who uses Gmail and understands the bunching together of conversations knows what a great help that is. Wave needs you to create a wave and add people to it. It’s like calling a meeting with a headline agenda. Except that this meeting, obviously starts when the first participant joins and ends… probably never 🙂
Once on a wave, you can use all kinds of rich media including feeds from other sources on the web. And, since this is collaborative (everyone can work on the “Wave” at the same time) anyone on the Wave can insert a reply or edit the wave directly.
Quote from Google blog:- “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.”:-Unquote
On a side note, it will be interesting to see what impact this has on Twitter, or does Google still intend to go ahead and purchase Twitter (rumours, rumours folks; maybe nothing to them!) and integrate it into this gigantic mesh.
Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol
What most of us are really going to be using is the Google Wave product. This is a web-application built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
And, of course, the more you do so, the more you are going to have to be on Google’s cloud and all your data will start their slow but inexorable march to the Google’s server.
Quote frm the Google blog:-“Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave. -Unquote
If this works, all that most of us are ever going to need is a computer running a browser and broadband connection for our everyday computing needs. Of course, we will all have the same residence in cyberspace and the landlord will be Google.
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