Thursday

Social Network

Google’s Wave: Many Online Apps in One Tool

• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

GOOGLE HAS released to developers an ahead of schedule version of a complicated colaboration and communications tool that consolidates features of e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, and multimedia management, as well as document sharing.

Called Wave, the Web application is the equivalent of a Swiss army knife for consumer online services and is maybe one of the riskiest and most ambitious endeavors Google has embarked on.

At its core, Wave Jets people start a document to which multiple users can add rich text, multimedia, gadget applications, and feeds, and do so concurrently, much as people interact on, say, instant messaging. Users can roll back these “waves” to view the evolution of the document.

In the works for about two years, Wave could draw people away from the company’s other products (Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Picasa, and Sites), and from similiar products by competitors such as AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Wave could also fall flat if people don’t know its use, or if they can’t he convinced to give up e-mail, blogging, IM, and other individual online services.

Still, it is a bold attempt by Google to grant a unified Web application for communication and content creation needs, instead of integrating the company’s discrete online services.

“We’re banking on Wave having a very large impact, but a lot of it depends on our ability to clarify this to users. That’s part of the reason why we’re putting this out ahead of schedule to developers”, Lars Rasmussen, Wave project cofounder, says.

Even after working on the product for about two years, Rasmussen and the other members of the Wave enhancement team are still learning new uses for the tool, so he is very aware that grasping the promise of Wave will not be an automatic thing for end users.

Amplification further, he adds, “Now is a excellent time for developers to start picking up the APIs, building cool applications and extensions, so when we do launch later this year, our users and their users can delight in all these things collectively”.

Rasmussen and his brother Jens, the other Wave project cofounder, arrived at Google in 2004 when the company bought their mapping startup Everywhere 2 Tech; they made what would become Google Maps, a benefit credited with igniting the mashup frenzy.

Can Wave Solve Social Network Oversharing?

GOOGLE CALLS WAVE a marriage of e-mail and instant messaging. But to me it looks more like the kind official network that I’d really delight in, one everywhere I can specify the people With whom I want to share a comment, a photo, or a video.

One problem with Facebook is that most things you share go to everybody you’ve friended. from relatives to your boss. But few people want to share everything-like embarrassing pictureswith everyone they know.

Judging from the description and ahead of schedule screenshots of the benefit. Wave could be perfect for sharing content with only the people you choose.

The benefit’s basic element is called a ‘wave: which can be a simple text message. a collection of photos, a video, or other content. Just as with e-mail. you can choose exactly who you want to share a wave with. Those contacts can then make comments or question questions that the whole group sees. You can view the new comments in real time: or, if you haven’t been paying attention for a while, you can hit rewind and see chronologically how the wave developed. Each wave is like a new Facebook page made on the glide to share specific content with specific people.