What is Google Wave?

Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

This from Mashable:

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:

- Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook (Facebook) application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

- Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

- Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

- Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

- Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.

- Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

All of this sounds quite amazing – we’ll have to see if it lives up to the promises. As of now only a relative handful of people have been invited to take part in initial Wave testing, but I hear you can buy an invite on Ebay:

With Google releasing 100,000 invites to test the beta version of the much-hyped Wave, one enterprising blogger decided to capitalize on all the buzz surrounding the new messaging and collaboration tool by selling his invite on eBay.

Hagan Blount, a 30-year-old food blogger based in Baltimore, had been listening to the chatter about Wave and hatched the idea to auction his invite on eBay. “I figured there’s a whole lot of buzz. I wonder how many hits this would get?” he said.

Of course, Mr. Blount hadn’t yet received his invite, but he said that a software developer friend of his who did not wish to be identified had promised to procure one for him. Mr. Blount commenced the auction on Tuesday night, and by the time he had woken up at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the day that Google would be releasing Wave invites, his auction had already received 12,000 hits.

If you want to learn more about Google Wave, check out the official Google Wave Page and Mashable.com.

Tags: Google, google wave, instant messaging, mail, maps, Mashable, photos, richly formatted text, Social Networking, videos, web chat, wikis

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 8:17 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.