Google Wave – Basics and Important Pointers

Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool announced by Google at the Google I/O conference.  Google Wave is currently in developer preview phase. I got my access to the Wave Sandbox last week and I am playing with it since then; Trust me.. its just phenomenal! Special Thanks to Janakiram, who gave an overview & an excellent demo on Wave at the Bangalore GTUG Meet.

Well,  conceptually a wave is equal parts of conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly format text, videos, pics, maps, and more. It is a web based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging and social networking.

In wave, you can create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and also feeds. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. This feature is too good when you are chatting with someone.. You dont see that “Mr.X is typing…..”., instead you see the whole text what he is typing. This feature also takes a step forward towards managing blog comments. You can now see blog comments live. At business, it allows you to collaborate and communicate with your colleagues. If someone joins in late in your conversation, you have a “playback” to rewind the wave to see how it evolved.  You also have an intelligent contextual spell checker, which can check a spell based on the sentence context. For eg: “I had been to a shop, and the coffee been (been will get replaced to bean) smelled good”.

There are lots and loads of enhancements which are made for this communication platform.  For eg: Automatic preview of blog comments, twitter updates, document sharing etc.. the list could just goes on and on.. The best part being all this is Open source. Developers can just create their own plug-ins and load the same on their wave!! This concept evolved, could combine Google mail and Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to plan events and write documents collaboratively.

Communication platform being made so open and strong, guess where the User eXperience will reach its epitome.!!

Important Pointers:

1. Developer Conference Preview Video | Google IO 2009 – Click Here
2. Request your Wave Sandbox access – Click Here
3. If you are a developer and Wanna’ learn more on the Wave APIs – Click Here
4. Google Wave API forum – Click Here
5. Google Code Blog – Click Here
6. API Presentations – Click Here
7. Code Samples – Click Here

A Note on Bangalore -GTUG:

GTUG (Google Technology User Group) is a community where programmers meet to discuss and work with several Google developer resources and products. The group organizers conduct regular events that are similar to events conducted at Google I/O each year to enable programmers to learn about various Google technologies. You can learn more about the Bangalore GTUG here http://www.bangalore-gtug.org/. To be a part of GTUG, just click here, sign in with your Google Account and join the group!!

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