The New Wave – Google Wave

Google has always been flagbarrer in brining in innovative ideas and user friendly products in tech segment. Once again they are ready to come out with their innovate product “Google Wave”.  Question is what is “Google Wave”? Well, the answer to this question is the following video.

 

Google wave is basically a new age Internet communication platform which intergrates all the communication needs (i.e. instant messaging, chat, blogging, microblogging, colloboration, etc.) of a person into single platform. The most important thing is it’s open source product developed in Java (obviously it can’t be on microsoft platform :)) using Google web toolkit. So in future great minds can also contribute their bit in enhanching this product and coming out with more plug ins, extensions and other facilities.

Normally, I don’t have enough patience to watch any videos lasting 1 hr 20 mins but I saw the entire demo video in one shot yesterday. Above video demonstrates the cool features of Google wave. Some of the features I liked are

• display of message to the other user as you type (Normally when we use messenger most of our time waste in seeing the message “xxxx is typing”.) Instant display of message can be good and can be a bad as well. It depends on how we use it.
• Adding the notes into the messages with pictures.
• Playback feature to go through the history of message.
• Support for extensions and gadgets
• translation facilities. what it means is if you are communicating with french fellow who doesn’t know english and he keeps typing in french. But on your screen you will get that thing translated into the english instantly as he types.  (I think around 40 languages are supported for now. Don’t know whether any indian languages are supported or not. Also, not bothered about the perfect translation. शब्दो पर मत जाओ, भावनाओ को समझो :))
• excellent spell checker as demonstrated in video above
• blogging support from wave platform. (I don’t know rightnow whether it will support wordpress or not and if it does support whether it will reduce the blogging hassels for me)
• twitter, facebook, etc. micro blogging services support
• colloboration of infomration e.g. as shown in video above, no. of people can work on the same document and can also keep track of the history of changes.
• can be used as bug tracking tool 🙂
• support for mobile platforms as well

So after seeing demo I was really impressed. Now I’m eager to try my hands on it. But currently, use of google wave platform is only by invitation. Request for the google wave can be made from the following link

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

I have already requested for one. Hope I get it soon.