Thursday

Google’s Wave: Many Online Apps in One Tool

Filed under Social Network

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.

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