What exactly is Google Wave?
It’s an open source unified communications-like social networking platform that combines contacts, emails, social networks, and pretty much everything else you do socially online in one "wave" of an application. The video on the official Google release page mentions that it was made open source because more developers were needed to complete it, so they are reaching out to the community. It’s still in its beta phase.
I’ll try to make this answer snappy, since the Google I/O presentation about it is a full hour and 22 minutes long. I watched it so you won’t have to. Basically, Google Wave is an interface for dealing with complex conversation threads that Google is calling “waves.” In starting a new wave, you can select who participates in the wave, and start typing much like you would an email. Neatly enough, if the other people you’re sending to are online on the wave, they will see that you’ve made a new wave – and what’s super-cool – they’ll be able to see you typing in real-time. This makes it something like a chat program too, but also unlike any other that’s been made. Another very cool thing is that people can comment not only on the entire message you wrote, but on different segments in the middle of your message. By default, as well, anyone can edit the wave (editors’ names will be added, so you can’t just edit your friend’s message to say something embarrassing) – which makes it ideal for
According to this article, it is an attempt to “combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication.” Still confused? It’s supposed to be an all-in-one service that is a little Twitter, a little Facebook and allows real-time communication, photo and document sharing. It’s the everythingamajig! Later on Thursday, Google plans to publicly demonstrate Google Wave for the first time at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Billed as “the e-mail of the future,” Google Wave is the result of a multiyear project inside of Google to reinvent the inbox, blending e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and perhaps, with input from developers, connections to the world of social networking.
According to this article, it is an attempt to “combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication.” Still confused? It’s supposed to be an all-in-one service that is a little Twitter, a little Facebook and allows real-time communication, photo and document sharing. It’s the everythingamajig! Later on Thursday, Google plans to publicly demonstrate Google Wave for the first time at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Billed as “the e-mail of the future,” Google Wave is the result of a multiyear project inside of Google to reinvent the inbox, blending e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and perhaps, with input from developers, connections to the world of social networking.
