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'Wave' goodbye to email - Google Wave is on its way.

So this morning when I started up my computer and loaded its email client there was a small wave of emails about this thing called Google Wave. Something's happening over there at Google's developer's conference. It seems that in the keynote they have announced a new product/service called Google Wave. From the Google blog, we get the developer's story on Wave has evolved from an idea to where it is today. There is kind of an explanation on what it is - some kind of collaborative email (think like a cross between wiki, instant messaging and email and then throw in some rich text editing, multimedia embedding etc). SMH has a very brief article on it too that highlights the local (Australian) role in it - the developers. The O'Reilly blog has a much better description. On the O'Reilly blog there are some screenshots which help explain it a bit further. It looks like an interesting way of developing an idea collaboratively and potentially, very quickly which as O'Reilly points out, is a key feature of Google's services:

A key point here is that Google's relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication. When you're talking with someone, you know what someone is saying before they finish their sentence. You can respond, or even finish their sentence for them. So too with Wave. The real-time connectedness of Wave is truly impressive. Drop photos onto a wave and see the thumbnails appear on the other person's machine before the photos are even finished uploading.
Will it catch on? Not all Google's products instantly turn to gold (think Google Lively as a recent example) but they're out there trying and obviously have the resources to innovate in a way very few companies can match. One aspect of Wave that may help is that its all going to be open - open source, open protocols etc so any developers can grab it and start innovating, developing new services on top of it, competing with it (good luck) etc. On the area of real time editing and collaborating in email, I wonder what opportunities this creates for the spammers - imagine spam popping up while you are editing your wave! I am sure that won't really be an issue but since its a Google service and revenue is derived from advertising, I can't say that I would be surprised if contextual advertising popped up in real time while you are collaborating on the wave (there has to be a business model somewhere). It would be interesting to put Wave into a classroom to see how teaching and learning can apply it. It has many of the features that students are already very familiar with and I believe they would very rapidly adapt to it and put it to some very interesting uses very quickly. Google will be putting up a video on http://wave.google.com very shortly - at the time of posting it is not yet available but maybe by the time I change tabs and hit the refresh button, it will already be there!

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Posted May 29, 2009