Bowled Over by Google Wave
The computer world is buzzing about Google’s demonstration of Wave. What’s Wave? It’s hard to summarize in just one sentence. You’d better watch the video of the official demo to find out for yourself.
It’s more than email, more than a collaborative conversation, more than a way to share photos into a single collaborative photo album. You can have an email conversation that publishes to your blog and makes your blog and email a two-way conversation. You can have email conversations that track over time, add participants as you go (and give them full access to past history), and have private chats within the conversation. All within the same conversation – make a change anywhere, and the change is updated everywhere. Move between mobile and desktop/laptop devices.
Collaboratively author documents and discuss them. Show your conversations as you type to reduce waiting times. Real-time updates on your collaborator’s screen as you do them on yours – no need to refresh screens. Spell check that sees words in context. Embed your social networks. Play interactive games without leaving Wave. Embed maps (and add icons/mark them up), videos, polls, forms, Twitter (including ongoing Twitter monitoring for topics that interest you), and gadgets.
And it’s all open source, so developers can build on the Google team’s ideas.
I’m sure that when the time comes, we’ll discover that the EULA gives Google the legal option to harvest what we do, but I’m amazed at the ease with which I say, “Oh, we’ll deal with that later” as the video unfolds.
This video of the demo at Google IO is blowing me away. This is more than Web 2.0. I have a feeling that Wave is going to change everything. If only I could get a beta account … though I signed up to find out when it was available here (where, in addition to requesting notification when Wave is ready, you can leave a little poem or piece of art for the Wave developers – oh, how I love when the left and right brain merge).