Non Sufficit Orbis: Google Wave

Have you heard about the new app being developed by Google?

It's called Google Wave. I first came across it on Lifehacker's post "The Google Wave Highlight Reel". Lifehacker has eight short YouTube clips taken from the 80 minute preview given during Google I/O 2009.

Here's Google's description of Wave:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

I watched through the highlights first and then played the whole demonstration in the background. It's really amazing.

The team stated their goal was to answer the question "What if e-mail were invented today?" E-mail was created 40 years ago simulating snail mail. It doesn't take into account many of the technologies we use today to communicate: SMS, IM, blogging or social networking, or any combination of these technologies.

Google Wave is the answer to that question. And it is open source. Google wants developers writing code for Wave.

The demonstration highlights will give you an overall understanding of how the team combined these different technologies into a single real-time collaborative communication tool. That's a mouth full of jargon, but what it comes down to is that Wave starts off like any other email client, but allows you to reply to specific parts of the message, with that reply posted under that section of the message. And you get to see the reply real-time like in an IM. Only it's better than IM because the letters are transmitted real-time... not when the message is complete. And since it's one message and the replies are kept inline with the thread or "wave", someone who's added later to the thread can see EVERYTHING that everyone else has discussed. There's even a playback feature that allows a late comer to the thread to play the entire event back, starting with the original message and progressing through each progressive comment and reply.

To top it all off they have redefined the spell-check dictionary.

To start with, check out the short clips of Google Wave: The Google Wave Highlight Reel

Here's the full demonstration given by the Google development team on day 2 of Google I/O: