Google wave
Google wave is the project that Google team took up 2 years back, to revolutionize the way we communicate over web. This project code named as ‘Walkabout’ was revealed at Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a new real time, open source browser based communication tool that integrates on one single platform, all the ways in which we communicate now on web, like IMs, e-mail, social networking, blogs, wikis, project management.
Wave : Its features and terminologies
Waves are hosted XML documents that enable and synchronize a threaded conversation. We have to create a wave and add people to for a threaded conversation. The wave can be created for anything like conversation with a friend or for real time group editing of a document by any number of people or for both of them simultaneously. It offers a richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and feeds from other sources on the web. Users can give a reply or edit the wave directly. You can add a contact to a wave at anytime by just dragging the person from the contact list to the wave.
Key features:
- Real Time: You can see what your friend (who is involved in the wave) is typing at the very moment. This holds true both for instant messaging and editing docs in collaboration. This feature can be disabled by writing your text in draft mode. We can know who is editing the doc (among the several users) by seeing their name outlined by a bright coloured box.
- Open Source: Google wave will be an open source application so that developers can extend its functionality and make best use of it.
- Play back: This feature empowers one to catch up with smallest details of what has been happening in the past in that particular wave.
- Drag and drop file sharing: We just need to drag a file we want to attach and drop it in the wave.
- Waves can be embedded on any application, blogs, sites etc.
- Spell check: It can autocorrect spelling and grammatical errors and also provides automated translation for 40 languages.
- Wiki Functionality: All conversations and documents on a wave are shared. Hence we have the liberty to edit, append or comment on any information on the wave. If we want to have a private conversation with someone in the wave we can easily break off from the main league but we still stay in the flow of the wave.
The Jargons in Google Wave:
- Wavelet: A wavelet is a subset of a wave. For Example if we consider a history of conversation, considering one IMs conversation from that will be analogous to considering wavelet in a wave.
- Blip: Blip is an individual message in a conversation. Blips can have sub blips called children associated with them.
- Document: The characters, words and files in a blip are called a document.
- Embedded wave: This is the wave that is embedded to another website or blog.
- Extensions: Extensions are the applications we can use in our wave. Two types of extensions are :
- Gadgets: A gadget is an application that users might use for different purposes similar to the face book applications we use.
- Robots: They are automated users which are basically used to gather more information from different source and assist users in different actions.
Google wave consists of three layers namely:
- Google Wave product: The HTML5 web application, built on Google Web toolkit is the product users are going to use to access and edit waves.
- Google Wave Platform: This platform provides rich APIs used to build applications that work in a wave and embed waves in other web services.
- Google Wave Protocol: This is the format of storing and sharing waves which includes live concurrency control.
The people who are making this happen:
It was Jens Rasmussen, to whom this concept clicked for the first time and the team that is working in Google’s Sydney office to make it happen includes Lars Rasmussen and project manager Stephanie Hannon (The same team is responsible for developing Google maps also).
The reason of this web application being named as Google Wave has its roots in the frequent reference to the popular T.V. Series ‘Firefly’ in which ‘Wave’ is an electronic communication.
This phenomenal application is open for developers to have a hands-on and give a review. On September 30, this year, Google Wave will be made accessible to 1, 00,000 users who register on http://wave.google.com and later this year it is expected to hit the markets.
P.S. : For all WordPress lovers, there is a new plugin available to try out Google Wave called ‘Wavr’ , though at beta stage. Chill out !
