Wave? What’s that? What’s Google’s big bid to take over the world? Well, to be specific, Google Wave is a “web based service, computing platform, and communications convention engineered to merge email, IM-ing, wiki, and social networking.”
In simpler terms, it means they would like to make one web application ( keep in mind this is all based around HTML five ) that will integrate email, IM, your Twitter and Facebooks of the Earth, wikipedia entries, Photobucket type sharing and more, all in one window. Plus open it up for developers to take it in whatever direction they need from there. Briefly they would like to take over the world. And I joined up for the beta. (That’s all that it is now, 100,000 people will be given invitations later).
Huh? It sounds like it is a combination of everything. And…it just about is. And it seems like it does it very well. And in my humble opinion, it’ll change EVERYTHING.
I really do believe that there are huge social, business and casual implications to a platform that’s attempting to merge every one of our big online services into one platform. And I don’t mean they’ll just have a window here for email, and a window over there for IM, and a window up here for Twitter and put in all in one large window. No, this goes deeper.
They would like to integrate the back and forth threading, forwarding, responses and attachments of email, merge it into an IM style real-time talk system ( completely with literal real time, character by character updates of you typing, rather than seeing “Joe is typing” for an hour ), add some VCR features ( any new folk added to a “Wave” can see a play-by-play of the conversation as it occurred ), allow users to simultaneously upload, download, and delete photographs and integrate an exceedingly sophisticated spell checker into the entire process - with this one Google puts a bid on undoing the damage the last few years have done to our “lol u guz r da gr8tst” youth. And if you are unable to read that, don’t hurt your grey matter making an attempt to, I did just writing it.
Add in the incontrovertible fact they’re opening this up to development, open source style, and you have something that’ll be as enormous as Facebook, at least in the applications side of things.
Think about if firms were to take on Google Wave in large numbers. Pizza Hut gets Wave, and offers it to their clients. The pizza shop tweets through Wave a special deal they’re offering for the day. Buyer A decides he wants to reserve a pizza based totally on the Tweet he receives through Wave. Rather than calling, or working thru the online ordering system, maybe an application has been developed for Wave that permits the purchaser and an employee direct conversation for ordering a pizza. The customer jumps into a new wave with a restaurant worker, the employee takes the order and away we go.
This is a simple example that probably won’t even be close to anything which will come out, I’m sure what will come along will be Way more cool than anything that I could think about.
Think about for businesses. You are working in a web-based company, maybe providing web design, programming, and admin services for another company. The business possibilities are Massive for this, especially on big projects, with multiple departments working on one single project, or collaborations thru different departments.
Even in my shop, a digital camera repair if I have a digital camera to fix that one of my staff is working on and I’m on the road with my Netbook, I can just Wave with the employee to discover the standing and give that info straight to the consumer all extremely efficiently! Canon camera repair is now super simple thanks to Google.
So if you’re interested even a tiny bit, get on board, and use the Wave. I strongly believe this can change the face of things, the same way email, IM or social media has changed things.
