For many months now, I have been hear­ing a lot about this new, upcom­ing Google prod­uct called Google Wave. Throughout my daily rou­tine of scroung­ing the Internet for use­ful infor­ma­tion, I found RSS feeds that gave some insight into what Google Wave is and what it is all about. However, I never really paid much atten­tion to it sim­ply because I knew that it was by invite only, and I fig­ured that I would wait until I could actu­ally get my hands on it to under­stand its full scope. So the other day a col­league sent me an invi­ta­tion to join Google Wave. Here is my review.

For any­one who is curi­ous, Google Wave is an online col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­form that allows for the exchange of email, instant mes­sag­ing, files, and web ser­vices. Essentially, Google Wave is a form of real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Google Wave could be used for team and project man­age­ment or for brain­storm­ing on ideas. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. One just needs to be famil­iar with using Google Wave. The unique UI may throw off some peo­ple who are famil­iar with Google’s prod­ucts. But Google pro­vides videos to get up to speed on Wave’s nav­i­ga­tion and usage. I have only used it for a few days or so and the longer I tin­ker with it, the more I start under­stand­ing how pow­er­ful Wave is.

The foun­da­tional con­cept in Google Wave is what is known as a wave. Waves are threads of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that a group of peo­ple can con­verse on and share files. These waves are like con­ver­sa­tions where you can choose to fol­low, mark as spam, reply, and even play­back the wave. Playing back a Wave pro­vides the abil­ity to see how the con­ver­sa­tion devel­oped by each per­son com­mu­ni­cat­ing via that wave sort of like a line-by-line of replies entered by the mem­bers. It may sound con­fus­ing, but it is easy to under­stand the con­cept once you start fid­dling with it.

I have tried the basic com­mu­ni­ca­tion within a wave. In real-time, you can see the text being entered as oth­ers are typ­ing. Files can be uploaded or dragged-and-dropped onto the wave which so far works well with pic­tures and PDFs. Supported pic­ture for­mats will pro­vide an over­lay to pre­view those images within the browser whereas PDF files will need to be down­loaded to one’s com­puter in order to view them. I have not tried audio or video files yet, but I assume that such files will have a pre­view func­tion within Google Wave soon if it cur­rently lacks it.

Google Wave also sup­ports an API so that third-party devel­op­ers can cre­ate exten­sions and web ser­vices for it. With this abil­ity, I see Google Wave being inte­grated into many web appli­ca­tions such as con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems or other com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­forms. Likewise, the con­verse is true. Other ser­vices could be inte­grated into Google Wave. Such a plat­form pro­vides a mul­ti­ple of uses and this is some­thing that I will cer­tainly inte­grate into my work­flow. Of course, Google Wave is still pre­ma­ture and has some rough cor­ners. Entrance into Google Wave is through invi­ta­tion only. I have a few Google Wave invites that I can share. If inter­ested, let me know.

Links

• Ars Technica Google Wave Review
• Google Wave Extensions List