Overview of 'real-time communication platform', Google Wave

By Lisa van Gelder


Google is very good at taking existing products that we take for granted and improving their usability - search, maps, webmail, documents. As well as improving usability, they are also encouraging a shift in where we store our information. Instead of a word document on our computer that we email to people when we are finished, we can have a document online that people can comment on while it is in progress. Instead of downloading email to our computer from our isp or company email server, it is accessed via the web. The computer becomes the tool to access information stored elsewhere, rather than the repository for all our information.

Google Wave is taking both these ideas a step further - usability and shared online data. At the core of Wave is an attempt to improve the usability of email - not just by writing a new email client, but by creating a new protocol. Their stated aim is that "waves may succeed email as the dominant form of Internet communication".

The biggest thing they want to change is concurrency so that email becomes a truly collaborative tool. At the heart of the wave protocol is a very smart algorithm that allows truly concurrent editing.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
Imagine you are working from home. You send a couple of emails to send people the new spreadsheet you have created. There is an urgent problem, so you use instant messaging to talk people through a fix. You know the same problem happened last week, so you search your emails to find an attachment which held the last resolution.

Wave would let you do this in one place - drag and drop documents into a conversation and edit them with collaborators. Edit messages from before so important information can be kept. Talk concurrently with collaborators. Even playback a conversation step by step. It is bringing different tools together in one place - email, documents, instant messaging, so they are properly integrated. It is all about bringing all your data together, online, in a way that is easily shared with others.

Associated Link: More: Overview of Google Wave

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