GWave: Google Wave
Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:
- Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.
- Embedd'ability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.
- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook (Facebook) application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.
- Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
- Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.
- Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.
- Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.
- Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.
Alot of debate goes on todate if twitter or facebook is going to fade away with the rise in visibility of google wave across the "consumer" community.
What Google is after here is the ability to construct conversations and not just a thread but where each participant came in. So we have the originator, that asked a question, the first respondent and the third, not just the third respondent, but where and how that third respondent entered the conversation and why. You can fill in the rest. - Chris Lang, follow on GBuzz.Even if FB is not going to be killed, it would be provided with tough a time maintaining Facebook or Twitter; akin to Yahoo fading away when Google walked in. But to gain market control, Google would want consumers as well corporate-consumers (probably Twitter, FB and the likes) to build upon/surrounding the wave APIs.
So when should you use Google Wave? Some of the areas that you can cater using google wave are:
- Organizing events
- Group projects
- Photo sharing
- Meeting notes
- Brainstorming
- Interactive games
The IDE in the video is Eclipse, NetWeaver Developer Studio (NWDS) for SAP development, but thats just the framework.
Another application of using dynamic work flow using Google Wave for corporate customers is worth checking out.
Sign up? Would you still want to sign up for google wave, here you go.
Developing upon Google Wave?
If you are interested in running your own wave setup using the information here and experiment with, try logging onto waveprotocol.org;
At this time the sandbox doesn't allow robots to run other than on AppEngine at the moment - if you know any Java at all you might want to follow the Java Robot Tutorial to get an idea of the kind of thing you'll be able to do; that Jon Skeet is maintaining.
Here is Google Wave developer preview:
You might also need the Google Wave API forum along with the API/SDK FAQ list. This resource contains more information.
Should you feel like digging more into it; this article is a definite read; the guy has come up with a small program called Bingy Bot; a bot that answers to your question. It uses Bing APIs (link requires you to login) to search for the question asked; the bot gets plugged into the wave.
Type a question, like "what is an elephant?" or just key in a flight number to get the status. Bingy will answer if it knows. Bingy interfaces with Bing using the XML APIs to do instant searches.Wave Gadgets site is already up and running in production, where you can find - the community maintained - catalog for extensions to Google Wave. Currently listing 39 gadgets and 116 robots.
Now that the Wave of Google Wave is here, only time would tell what lies there in future. Or probably, as someone pointed out, Google Wave is here for us to:
- Making life "more" unsocial;
- Make communications that would be ill-advised in real-life
- Buy things we haven't seen in real life
- Unlearn things that are useful in real life (like spelling)
Happy Waving! (0:
