Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009.It is a web based service, computing platform, and communications protocol.
It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.
Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:
- Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.
- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.
- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.
- Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
- Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.
- Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.
- Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.
- Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.
While these are only a few of the many features of Google Wave, it’s easy to see why people are extremely excited.