Explaining the fuss about Google Wave
By Beth Alcorn, in Web Strategy, Web Development, Web Marketing
Google recently announced a new product in the works - Google Wave. Google Wave is an online collaboration and communication tool, due for release in late 2009.
What does that actually mean?
Working on a Wave will be like using email, instant messenger, a document manager and file explorer (and storage) all in the one place. With Google Wave, people in your network will be able to view, edit, and interact in real-time.
Open Source
If all goes to plan, we'll all be using Google Wave in our daily activities - sometimes without even being aware of it. One of the most interesting things about Wave is that Google are looking to the community to help build the infrastructure, by making it open source. This will make it easy to integrate Wave in lots of different tools and programs we already use on a regular basis, to enhance them and make them work better together.
Some examples
People are excited about the Google Wave idea because of how vastly it could change how we work together on projects. A Wave could be a family or personal project, like an online holiday scrapbook, in which people can add comments to photos or even add their own photos from the trip. It could take the form of a collaboration between workmates; crunching numbers or designing a web page.
In the pipeline
Google Wave is still in development (at June 2009) so keep an eye out for more on this in late 2009.