Google Wave Gets a Developer Preview
June 2, 2009 by Becky Scott
Filed under Marketing
While everyone’s buzzing about Microsoft’s new venture, Bing, Google is introducing a new product that may just change the way you use email. It’s called Google Wave and it is nothing if not ambitious. The product was shown to developers at Google I/O and while it’s not ready for an official release, it already has many people buzzing.
credit: dailylifeofmojo
Google is defining its wave as
“…equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”
It combines IM and inline responses to messages and almost instant updates. Two people can work on a “wave” at the same time and see the typing as it happens. It incorporates conversations much the way Gmail already does, but you can add someone mid-conversation and even play back the previous messages so the new person can catch up.
And Google is making the protocol open so developers can create extensions that work with the program. In fact, the attendees at Google I/O were promised development accounts so they could go in and take a look and start working on extensions with the Google Wave API. It does, however, rely on the HTML 5 standard, which is a new standard that most of the browsers are ready to implement (except Microsoft, apparently). The sharing potential is pretty amazing. TechCrunch did a thorough review of the product, too, which you should peruse if you’re intrigued about the product.
You can watch Google’s announcement video below. What do you think about Google Wave? Do you think it will revolutionize email and IM?
