Google Wave was announced at the Google IO developers' conference in late May 2009.
Quick Summary:
- SaaS team workspace.
- To give you a general idea, think of a souped-up/Web 2.0 Wiki or bulletin board. My colleague Steve Kille aptly called it a "bulletin board on steroids" under the hood.
- Currently in an early state of development.
- Google wants to get developers to integrate with Google Wave. This presentation was to encourage them to start writing Wave applications.
- Expect general availability in perhaps mid-2010. As noted, this is still early-stages code.
- Main features currently:
- Post messages and responses to them--build extensive conversations.
- People can concurrently work on documents.
- Send instant messages.
- Post photos and videos.
- Built-in access controls.
- Highly interactive.
- Support for mobile clients, with more limited user interfaces, is anticipated.
- There's a very nice ability to see how conversations have evolved, step by step.
- Works with external workflows.
Application Platform:
- Many third-party integrated applications are anticipated.
- Google wants Wave to be open and interoperable. To this end, it will:
You can see the main presentation here. It runs for 80 minutes; it's worthwhile if you're interested in SharePoint/teamspace style collaboration.
Comments:
- Wave has big potential to provide shared workspaces.
- Google presents Google Wave as a more modern alternative to email. It's an exciting and attractive technology, but one that I think is more of an alternative to SharePoint and team workspaces in general.
- It has some very important advantages over SharePoint, some of which are its openness and user- and developer-friendliness.
- The ability to concurrently edit live documents (rather than the traditional ECM approach of checkin/checkout) is very attractive.
- It appears relatively easy to build third-party, tightly integrated applications.
- Several extremely attractive applications were demonstrated, including:
- An intelligent context-sensitive spell checker. For example, it can choose between the correct versions of "been" and "bean"; or change "Icland" to "Iceland" or "island" depending on what's appropriate.
- A very nice on-the-fly language translator. The demo showed English/French; 40 languages are supported in all.
- Notably, it currently lacks group calendaring. Presumably this can be fixed before too long.
- Notably, it currently lacks good support for the posting of email items. That's a harder problem, as SharePoint's poor email system illustrates.
- Emails will be important elements of Wave spaces. Google should show natural and easy ways of posting and using them.
- There are various types of access controls. It's unclear at this point how well they will serve corporate needs.
... David Ferris