Google Waves goodbye to communication divide

 

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Posted on 29 May 2009 at 09:10

Google has provided a first peak into a new web application that it claims will bring together various forms of communication in one place—Wave.

Born out of a side project by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the engineers behind Google Maps, Google Wave is a tool for creating “waves” equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more, to use Lars’ description.

“In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it,” he writes on the Google Blog. “Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content—it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use ‘playback’ to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”

For the moment the project remains under wraps to the general public. Google will be opening its source code to developers who wish to get involved and is publishing API’s that will enable the embedding of waves in other web services and encourage the development of extensions that work within waves.

“With Embed, you're able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScript API. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors,” said Douwe Osinga, software engineer for Google Wave APIs. “With Extensions, you're able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client.”

One such robot already in the works is Tweety, which incorporates Twitter.

Lars Rasmussen says that Wave will remain a developer preview for some months, but you can sign up to be notified when it goes live at wave.google.com.

Author: Simon Aughton