Google’s latest endeavor – Google Wave – was announced on Friday at the Google I/O Developer conference in San Fransisco and it’s already had a ripple effect all over the internet. Google describes it as a new tool to change the way people communicate and collaborate on the web. It’s a new take on emailing that looks like instant messaging but lets you integrate rich text formatting, photos, videos, maps, and other widget, etc you please.
But it’s difficult to summarize the complexity of this product in a post so you can ride the full demo wave at the Wave microsite – the full 1 hour and 20 minutes of it!
Wave is also fully open source and developers can use the Wave API to build their on extensions into it. And whilst the demo presentation is frequently punctuated by applause there are mixed reviews about Wave. Fast Company were quick to release their ‘Five Reasons to be Terrified of Google Wave“, asking:
“what is it with platforms? How many of these things can we have before we all join hands across America? Any company with moderately ambitious developers is already trying to handle smartphone apps, Facebook’s API, Twitter, widgets, and who knows how many other endeavors. Do we really need to throw another silo of communication on the pile?”
Tech Crunch are more impressed with the product and you can read their in depth review of wave here.
Launching off the Google platform Wave has a very strong likelihood of success, and there is no doubt it offers impressive real time communication tools. You can sign up to get updated about the release of Wave here.
