Lets wave hi to Google Wave

Last thursday, Cyber world was awaiting curiously for the announcement of a new technology that will be unveiled soon by the software giant Microsoft. The technology – Bing, previously code named as ‘Kumo’, is a new search engine with a new approach of helping the users to take better decisions. Off course, the announcement got the attention of the bloggers and press, who immediately started talking about Bing, mentioning that Bing is going to be the Google Killer. But, the actual killer application was waiting to be announced, and it was from Google. In Google I/O, Google engineers announced a new application Google Wave – a new communication product. With wave, people would be able to work and collobarate more effectively.

Google Wave – a new way of communication:

Google wave is full of hosted communications. i.e. when you want to send some information/message/photo to your friend, your create a wave which will be hosted in a centralized server, a wave provider in other words. After the wave is created, you can add what ever you want to the wave and add your friend to the wave, so that your friend can see the wave in his wave application. When your friend wants to reply to you, he/she can edit the same wave and save it. But this is how the traditional emails are working na !? No. There are some important aspects where Wave differs from Email systems.

• Hosted Communications – a wave is hosted in centralized server and is a shared object. But in email, you will be having a copy of your mail in your mail server and when you send a mail to your friend, he will be having a different copy is his email server and it goes like this.
• No need to send a wave – since a wave is a shared object, there is no need to send a wave to your friend. Instead, you will be adding your friend to the wave and he will be getting access to edit the shared object.
• Close to real-time data transfer – this is a big advantage of hosted communication. When you edit a particular wave in your browser, the changes are immediately send to the the server. If there are other people were also added to the same wave, they will be able to see all your changes at the same time. This feature replaces the need for instance messaging application. In IM, you have to wait till the other person send the message to you, but in Wave you can see what the other person’s message is as he typing it.
• Play back the wave changes – again, the power of shared communication object. Since the wave is hosted in a server and shared between people, the server can easily track what are all the changes made to that wave. So, in your wave, you will be able to play back the changes, to see how message was evolved.
• Adding comments – wave uses can add comments at any place in the wave. Comments need not to be placed at the end of the message, like how the blog comments are working now. In wave, use can insert comment anywhere in the wave.

In short, a wave is nothing but a mixup of Email, Instance Message, Wiki, photo sharing and a Blog. From the initial impression, Wave has the great potential to change the way the communications are working now.