Why is Google Wave so Cool?
If you're part of the IT / web world then the chances are you've heard of this thing called Google Wave. Google Wave was previewed at Google I/O back in May 2009, (you can watch the video here) since then Wave has taken the world by force with people going crazy for an invite so they can play with this mysterious technology. So why is Google Wave so cool? Well lets start with what Wave is about, and know one knows it better than Lars Rasmussen who said :
"A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more." Lars Rasmussen, 2009
When you start seeing how the model works you can see where Wave has great implementations to how we do things now, one of the things which interests us is using Wave for collaboration on projects, using Wave's for development work like functional specifications where the developers and managers can be part of the Wave and edit it as they go.
At the very end of September Google released 100000 invites to the developers of the world and everyone wanted one; we weren't lucky enough to be part of that group by we received our invites from Google two weeks ago, since then we've been "Waving" to each other and Google has even been nice enough to send through another set of invites, hence the window to the right.
As we've been lucky enough to have a few invites sent to us by Google, we have all been playing with Wave for the past couple of weeks and so far we've been impressed.
So far we've been using Wave for fun really like; Waves to organising nights out, stupid joke Waves, Waves to find out what's for dinner, Waves for who we've invited, Christmas Waves and the only serious Wave I can think of is for brainstorming on projects, but take it from us, it is fun, especially watching people type in real time.. and mess up :-).
Google Wave Screen Shot
Wave Invites Left
We're giving away some of our invites, just e-mail team@vivosystems.co.uk for your chance to be part of Google Wave craze :-). (8, 7, 6)
5
Some Wave Misunderstandings
A lot of people at the moment think yeah, Google Wave is cool, it's another wicked web application from Google, like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Analytics but they'd be wrong; Google Wave is much more than that for a couple of main reasons which we'll explain below.
What people don't realise is that Wave is a protocol, like e-mail and is open for everyone to read, learn and use, if you're interested you can view the website http://www.waveprotocol.org/. This is cool but for most people it won't make any difference, but for the people like us who develop software this opens up a whole world of opportunities; people, companies and organisations will write their own Wave servers which if they choose will be able to communicate with the Google Wave servers. Many of these servers will be free and open source and like web servers and many other servers out there will be installed on machines all around the world so people will be able to use Wave behind their company firewalls if they choose for internal collaboration, or even in their own bedrooms.
Another thing which many people don't quite get yet is that the Wave interface being used at wave.google.com is Google's implementation of a Wave user interface, but as Wave is open and a protocol you'll see other user interfaces for Wave being developed soon by companies around the world, this will probably happen when Wave servers start appearing.
These points above are another reason why Google Wave is cool and why it should take off once released.
26th November 2009 @ 15:30
