Right Now Developers are Trying Their Hands on the Tool

Google unveiled the prototype of its newest product Google Wave in its second Annual I/O conference that held on May 27 - 28, 2009 at Moscone Center, San Francisco. A grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard was laid out by Vice President engineering Vik Gandotra. He uncovered Google’s new personal communication and collaboration tool by saying, “I guarantee you that over the next one and a half hour as you see this product you will forget that you’re looking at the browser.” What followed was the early developer preview of Wave which will be made public later this year.

The minds behind this innovative tool are none other than brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, whose previous brainchild was the amazing Google Maps. Google Wave not only ties email and instant messaging together, but also adds a lot of functionality on top of it. The idea sparked from the realization that email and instant messaging were still today’s most popular modes of communication despite having being invented long ago. Today the web is much more robust full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. “Today we can ask ourselves what might email look like if it was invented today not four decades ago,” said Lars Rasumuss. “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today” is how he answers his own question.

So what actually is about Google Wave that’s caused so much buzz lately? Putting it in Google’s own words, 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.”

Following Google’s ‘launch early and iterate’ trend, Wave also was released before it was fully developed. Vick told the 4000 plus audience (all developers) of the conference that the reason of Wave’s early release was the “powerful demonstration of what’s possible in the browser.” He further explained that Google had made the service open source not only for increased contribution to the internet, but also to have developers help Google enhance and complete the product. Developers are able to give their valuable input to the service by gaining access to Wave’s Sandbox but Google is only giving out accounts to developers who intend to build with the Google Wave APIs prior to the public release. Using these APIs, the Sandbox area allows developers to demonstrate their creations and answer any questions. According to a Google blog post on the event, the Sandbox features a wide range of developers who have built applications based on technologies and products featured at Google I/O.

Google Wave will radically change the way we communicate and collaborate. Some of Wave’s features include:

Open Source
Google Wave is open source for increased contribution to the internet and to have developers help Google enhance and complete the product. It also fosters innovation and adoption among developers.

Real Time
In traditional chat the user has to wait for the other participant to press enter for his message to be visible to the first user. Google Wave comes with a unique and exclusive feature that enables a user to see what the other participant is typing, character-by-character in real time.

Embeddability
It’s possible for users to embed the waves on blogs and websites. Whatever is happening in a wave is also visible in a live wire style on the blog or website the wave is embedded on.

Applications and Extensions
Waves carry the flexibility for the developers to build their own applications just like a Facebook app or an iGoogle gadget. The apps can include anything from real time games to bots.

Wiki
As all the conversations are shared on a platform (unless you choose a private conversation), anything happening on a wave is editable. Users can even other participants’ posts in real time and even collaborate in a developing conversation.

Playback
Users can playback a wave to see how a wave developed step by step and who made what changes to it. Playback gives the user a clear idea about how a situation on a wave took it’s current form.

Spellcheck
Wave features an amazingly advanced spellcheck that “takes the context of the word into account” is even able to autocorrect similar words like “bean” and “bean” as per context. A demonstration of the spellcheck included typing “icland is an icland” which was instantly autocorrected to “Iceland is an island”.

Drag and Drop
Wave is free from the ‘attachment’ trouble. Which means that the user can simply drag and drop virtually any sort of file into Google Wave to which all other participants have full access.