It's a little bit instant messenger, and a little bit email. A little bit Facebook, a little bit Flickr, a little bit Youtube, a little bit Google Docs and a little bit CRM tool. What is it? It's Google Wave, which its creators, Lars and Jens Rasmussen describe as a "A communication and collaboration tool" as well as "a mix of conversation and document that lets you perform very many tasks, from instant messaging, to sharing photos, email, sharing maps and more."
It's quite hard to describe, and because it's only available to developers, so far, you can't even get your hands on it to test it out yet (although you can sign up to be one of the first at wave.google.com). But we did get to see a demonstration, and heard people variously describe it as being like twitter on steroids, or like email with web 2.0 mashups. Google see it as the one place where you can manage all your email and communications.
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| Just one example of Google Wave's possibilities, as an inbox, in this case, with a conversation in progress. |
What we got to see in the demonstration was fascinating. Within Wave, you click New Wave and from there, a conversation begins. You can drag in photos or files, write, and more. Once a conversation has begun, you can also drag and drop to add people to the conversation - they can see the whole conversation - whatever format it's in - and replay it to see what edits and alterations have been made. Within a Wave, there are "helpers" that you can include - in our demo we got to see ‘Feedy' in action - a tool that the Google Australia developer team whipped up in two days. Feedy includes RSS feeds into a conversation. But there are helpers for much more, as our gallery shows.
It will be available to Developers in Australia at Google's developer day on June 19, and for consumers, it will be a long wait until the end of the year before we can try it out. Google's hope is that the 4000 developers who received a copy of the Google Wave Federation Protocol this morning will build Waves and helpers that you can then make use of once the Wave goes live to consumers around the world.
In chatting to the Google Wave developer team this morning, we learned that the Wave will work on all browsers, except IE6 and older. Wave is designed to work with HTML 5, which notably has some way to go for full implementation in Internet Explorer. "It works on Safari and Chrome and the latest Firefox versions. Opera is close to working, but we've got a long way to go on Internet Explorer," said Lars Rasmussen this morning. Another Google staffer said that they aimed to get it working for all browsers: "People will not have to upgrade their browser to use Wave."
Building Wave for HTML5 adds a number of advantages over HTML4 compatible applications that might do similar things. Those include persistent HTML sessions, easy drag and drop capability and backgrounding of status checking and other work.