How Google Wave is a Killer App for Converged Email, IM, Forums, Social, Enterprise

Google Wave is one stop solution that will change the way you communicate to your Friends, Family, and at Work.

Wave a complete Collaboration tool, that let’s you do everything in REALTIME! In other words it’s a LIVE communication platform that will converge your Email, IM, Docs, Apps, Videos, Photos, wikis, Office Collaboration(Bugs, Reviews, Meetings, Discussions,etc.), Social Media, and any type of External tools (using Extesnions which are easy to integrate) to build one elegant, in-browser communication and Extensible to Desktop client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss or share all the stuff described above.

Describing Google Wave in a single Blog is way to impartial. I`ll try to cover as much as possible, but at the end of the day, it’s much more extensible than that.

Google Wave has alot of innovative features, here are few that have been exposed by Google, till date:

– RealTime: Everything you do in Google Wave is REALTIME. For Instance, you can see what the other party is typing, character-by-character. You can edit/modify the same document along with the other users. This was never possible till date. The Integrated Search is also REALTIME. The moment other party creates a draft or message that matches your search query, it pops-up immediately.

Advanced Spell Check and SMART Correction and Translation: You no longer have to worry about grammatical, or spelling mistakes. It not just finds mistakes but also fixes them as you type – to the most intelligent word that suits the sentence formation – including the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly, from the large no. of available languages. It’s the industry’s most advanced spell check and decision cum Translation engine.

– Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website and it will still work in the same way, everything is in Realtime, all features same.

– Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots that does some routine task like search something on twitter automatically and popup to your inbox to complex real-time Multi-player games.

– Collaborated-Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave, when shared to all or a list of people, 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, all in realtime. Imagine a document being reviewed by 10 different people, all at same-time, while they see what others are doing.

– Open source: The Google Wave is developed in web’s most advanced tool, Google’s Web toolkit (GWT), and the code will be open source, to encourage innovation and adoption amongst developers.

– History and Playback: For everything you do, a History is maintained. At anytime, for anyone, you can playback any part of the Wave to see what was said. This functionality is inherited to everything that runs inside Wave i.e. from a Game to a Review conversation.

– Drag-and-drop Sharing: No Browsing, No attachments; All you need to do is drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access. You can share your Photos, no longer need of opening Picasa to do it. Share your media on the fly. And coz it’s realtime, thumbnails will appear for everyone else as they are uploaded. And if you publish them on a blog, and update Photo comments later, they are automatically updated on the blog aswell.

– HTML5: What Makes Wave even better is, it’s all on the upcoming open standard HTML 5. Currently, Google Wave can run independently on the Desktop using Google gears, but in future, with HTML 5 standard getting matured, it will be inbuilt in browsers.

Mobility: The same experience is available on mobile web browsers on most smartphones like iPhone, Androids. No modification of code is required for that. In case you write new plugins, you have to just take care of layout, that only eats 5% of the effort.

Hosted Service/Independent Servers: This is the best thing. Google let’s you modify the original code and let’s yu run it independently as a competition to google. A more practical use it to use it within an Enterprise or an Organization that may or may not want to share the data on the public Internet. You can take your own server, database and host it inside your premises, independent of the world and still let them integrate with other Wave applications around the globe( if you want to). This will encourage Enterprise’s Web 2.0 to be more effective than before becuase of the collaboration tools discussed above.

Google Talks about their plan for Open sourcing the protocol to enable Entriprise 2.0, Extensibility, Inter-Operatability.

Google quotes:

Google Wave introduces a new platform built around hosted conversations called waves–this model enables people to communicate and work together in new and more effective ways. On top of that, with the Google Wave APIs, developers can take advantage of this collaborative system by building on the Google Wave platform. We want to expand upon that platform, which is why we’ve put together the initial draft of the Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers.

Yes, that’s between wave providers: anyone can build a wave server and interoperate, much like anyone can run their own SMTP server. The wave protocol is open to contributions by the broader community with the goal to continue to improve how we share information, together. If you’re interested in getting involved, here are a few things you should check out on www.waveprotocol.org:

  • Draft Protocol Specification — This is an early draft and will definitely change
  • Community Principles — Understand how this open source project works
  • Architecture White Papers — Learn more about the components of Google Wave
  • Google Wave is much more than all this. You really have to checkout the Application to feel the Excitement.

    Because, It’s not yet launched to public, for the meanwhile you can watch the Video and Screenshots below:

    Screenshots:

    A conversation in Wave:




    Concurrent rich-text editing in Wave:



    A sample Wave extension for event planning:




    Event planning, with a map:




    Another sample Wave extension, for games:




    How you add someone to a Wave:




    Contextual spell-checking in Wave:
    How to get it?
    Currently, Its not available. Though if we you want to be among first who get hands-on, signup for an invite at http://wave.google.com. Google will be giving out invites as early as September 30th.
    so go ahead and grab one.
    VERDICT:
    20 years back when Email was invented, we never thought it would become a mandatory thing in life. And if it had been invented today, definitely it had been something like Google Wave. It will replace all othermodes of communication that we use online today. Though it’s not wise to say this but it will challenge Social media sites like Facebook aswell. Why would I go ot Facebook when I can do the smae thing on this Converged Application.
    Google Wave is the future of Converged communication solutions for the web. I would expect Google Voice and VOIP (GTalk voice) Integration in future which will make it THE KILLER APP.

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    15 thoughts on “How Google Wave is a Killer App for Converged Email, IM, Forums, Social, Enterprise”

    1. When I looked at it 2 months back, i ignored it considering it to be something like “Friend connect”. but now I read it, and i know, it`s bright future for Wave.
      BTW, we need voice to be enabled on this. Then it’s a real killer.

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    2. Google is a weird company. They offer a lot for free, so what’s in it for them? In the long haul I think Google wants to BE the internet. The perfect matrix.

      PS: You you should check your speeling. Their’s a load typo’s;-)

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    3. Interesting post. But I would prefer to disagree. Check out my verdict on Google Wave as an Email killer here – Google Wave; Will it Prove to be the Ultimate Email Killer?

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