Surfing the Google Wave – The Latest Social Media Craze
On September 30th Google launched its newest product offering, Google Wave. With only 100,000 initial participants, access was limited to those with connections or a bit of good fortune. Certainly Wave is Google’s most talked about new product release since Gmail launched in 2004.
Google wave is being touted as the future of email. Wave combines elements of email, project collaboration and IM into one slick project management style interface. You can bring together a group of friends or plan a meeting with business partners and colleagues. You can brainstorm together or talk aimlessly about how your day has been.
Google Wave has a ton of innovative features, but here are just a few key features that will shape the futures of online collaboration tools.
It’s Real time. In most cases, you can see what a participant is typing, letter for letter as they are typed. Even the mistakes.
Waves are embeddable. Individual waves can be embedded on any blog or website.
It’s extensible. Similar to Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps that operate within waves. From simple applications to full featured games.
It has Drag and Drop file sharing. No more attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside a Google Wave and everyone will have instant access.
These are only a few of waves many many features. Thus, it’s easy to see what all the hype is about.
Take for example Twave. Twave is an extension based on a Google Wave robot, a robot is an automated participant in a wave conversation. In this case, a wave robot, named “Tweety.” Using Tweety in a wave will result in a full blown stream of your Twitter feed within that Wave. You can see tweets, and it even looks like you can manage them like emails, you can reply, archive and even use Google Wave’s innovative playback feature.
While these are only a few of the many features of Google Wave, it’s easy to see why people are extremely excited.
--------------------------------------------