Google is eager to show off its new web application that will get release later this year known as Google Wave. Google says Wave is open source and it’s rare for Google to show new application when the application is still not yet finished. It’s clearly that Google wants as many developers to be able to see the work in progress of Wave and get their hands on Wave’s API. Wave is also an open source because Google wants many developers around the world to help build Wave better as time ticks on.
So what is Wave? By viewing a YouTube introduction video to Wave, the Google’s engineers begin the introduction by showing off how Wave works similarly to email, but it is taking a more modern style. Email has been around for 40 years, but as time grew and networks of computers got improved, email has becoming everyday users centric. You think Gmail is great? Well Wave is even better! With Wave your email conversation flows smoother. Email users can open up the old conversation, enter new conversation between the old conversation and even between old conversation’s paragraph. In Gmail you get to use Google chat to chat with your friends, but Wave allows chatting to work within and between email’s conversations in real time — this means when your friends type something, you get to see letter by letter immediately. There is an option for you to check to disallow your friends to see what you are typing while typing.
While a typical Gmail’s single email conversation usually is between two persons, Wave allows you to add other friends and email users to your current email conversations. This means the email conversation or conversation grows even bigger and be more interesting. Wave takes your normal and boring email activity to a more exciting level by incorporating a social element and allow interaction in real time. There is also a playback option that allows you to see conversation in steps — this means you don’t have to guess who is talking to who when there is three or more people in a single conversation since the playback feature will play the conversation in steps. As a conversation goes on, sometimes a person in a conversation wants to whisper a private message to another person within a public conversation, Wave has a feature that allows you to do just that. Adding pictures to the conversations in Wave is cake, because all you have to do is to drag the pictures that you’ve highlighted on your computer’s hard-drive onto Wave’s conversations.
Bloggers will be like holy cow as they see Wave and blog works as if both are one application though blog and Wave are two different things, and this is possible because Wave has an API that allows this to work. Let say you read your friend’s blog post, and you want to write a comment under the blog post, and let say you did just that, your friend will see your comment under his blog (that’s normal); the kicker is that your friend also get to see your comment in Wave and doesn’t need to go to the blog to read your comment. For your friend, if he is using wave while he comments away on your blog, his or her Wave will also show the comment he or she wrote. Wave’s API allows websites such as wiki, forums, blogs, normal websites, and countless other types of websites to incorporate a very rich user interface that can handle conversations in amazingly exciting and modern approach. Users who use Wave do not have to check each conversation on each website that they have participated, but all they have to do is to log into Wave to continue their conversations, in real time or not.
There is a lot more to Wave and you can see what Wave can do in this YouTube’s video.
Wave is truly amazing by just looking at the demo video, and I’m anxious to see the real version of Wave when it gets release later this year. Another exciting thought is that Wave’s API may allow open source developers to develop some really cool widgets. There is no doubt that there will be many websites use Wave to enhance user experience. It’s a hopeful and exciting future for the online world provides to you by Google!
Vinh Nguyen
