Google Wave coming, could change communications as we know it

via DVICE by CharlieWhite on 7/24/09

In case you haven't heard, those Google geniuses are at it again. In September, you'll be able to browse to Google Wave, called a "personal communications and collaboration tool." This open-source, web-based wonder will let you combine your e-mail, instant messaging and social networking onto one personalized page on the web. Soon, you'll be communicating in "waves."

After the jump, take a look at the ten-minute presentation (it's well worth your time), and you'll see what makes Wave so revolutionary. It simply changes the way email, instant messages and social networking work, and gives you new ways to communicate with each other. It even lets you share files by dragging and dropping, and give any of your contacts access to them. It also works on mobile devices. This is going to be big:

Google Wave is a Mix of Chat, IM, Twitter and Google Docs in Real-Time

via Gizmodo by matt buchanan on 5/28/09

I have the feeling Google Wave is something you're gonna have to use to really understand: In the simplest terms, it's a live chatroom with a spread of documents, photos and/or videos, where you can reply to any part of any message or anything that's shared, and it's all real-time.

The idea is to drag email and IM into real-time—so it's free-wheeling mesh of Twitter, IM, Friendfeed really, any other kind of service presenting semi-real-time stuff in a stream. But in Google Wave, you can share and collaborate on projects, and all of this is mashed together at once, so it might be the ultimate service for people with ADD, or enterprise looking to simulate the feeling of 10 people standing around a desk scattered with a bunch of projects, but you're all able to work on any of them simultaneously while you're also whispering to the cute girl across the table about the new sushi place around the corner. You start a wave with any message or photo or whatever, and you bring people into the discussion, and then they can bring other people in as well (unless you block it or start kicking people out) so it's as public or private as you want it to be.

It's easy to see why Google would jump in here—real-time is the next iteration of the internets, and everybody's been obsessed with it since Twitter (look no further than Facebook). Not only does Wave elevate the collaborative and conversational aspect of real-time, Google's smartly pimping it from the app side too, pushing for apps that use and run within a wave, since a service is now really only as good as it is as a platform. At least, I think that's what this is all about. Maybe it's just a surfing chatroom. [Google Wave, Cnet]