Google Wave announced at Google I/O 2009
Posted May 28, 2009 by Gabriel Hurley
At the keynote this morning, Google announced a brand new product that they're calling Wave which is flat out amazing.
Imagine combining gmail, chat, and docs and turning them into one all-encompassing real-time collaborative tool. Yeah, that's just the beginning.
Everyone invited to the Wave can edit simlutaneously without conflicts.
All the changes appear on everyone's screen in real time. Text appears on your screen as the other people type.
You can embed all sorts of media: photos, videos, files, google gadgets... the list goes on.
"Robots" can be added that behave like active participants in the Wave, to do anything from context-aware spellchecking to translating text in realtime between user languages to publishing the wave content to the web.
Oh, and if you publish the wave to a blog or other web location, it embeds all the wave functionality and comments from the web page appear in the Wave client in real time for anyone that has it open.
They can be threaded, branched, split, merged, made private, integrated with outside systems... the potential is nearly limitless.
And it's all based on an open protocol and nearly open source code for the client. You can set up your own private server and have it play nicely with Google's servers and everyone else's, still in real time.
You want to write an extension for Wave? Just have it update the local XML and the Wave protocol takes care of the realtime updating for everyone else.
As Google puts the finishing touches on Wave and the developer community gets to work with it, odds are this will become something really amazing.
In a day or two the keynote video should be up on the web, and seeing is believing. It'll be up here:[EDIT]: The Keynote video and demonstration are now available at:
The service itself should be up and running for the public in a matter of months. For technical-minded folks you might also want to check out:
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
and
I'll have more info on all the amazing things at Google I/O later on, but this one was so amazing that I had to get it up now.
Enjoy!
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