Google Wave Product Reviews

Google Wave is an online software application product of Google, described as a personal communication and collaboration tool. It was first announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. On the 29th of November 2009, Google accepted most requests submitted soon after the extended release of the technical preview in September 2009.

Google Wave is designed as a new Internet communications platform. It is written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Google Wave works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added or removed from the wave at any point during a wave's existence.

Waves, described by Google as "equal parts conversation and document", are hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications. Any participant of a wave can reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave, and add participants at any point in the process. Each edit/reply is a blip and users can reply to individual blips within waves. Recipients are notified of changes/replies in all waves in which they are active and, upon opening a wave, may review those changes in chronological order. In addition, waves are live. All replies/edits are visible in real-time, letter by letter, as they are typed by the other collaborators. Multiple participants may edit a single wave simultaneously in Google Wave. Thus, waves can function not only as e-mails and threaded conversations but also as an instant messaging service when many participants are online at the same time. A wave may repeatedly shift roles between e-mail and instant messaging depending on the number of users editing it concurrently. The ability to show messages as they are typed can be disabled, similar to conventional instant messaging.

Google plans to release most of the source code as open source, allowing the public to develop its features through extensions. Google will also allow third-parties to build their own Wave services as quickly as possible (be it private or commercial) because it wants the Wave protocol to replace the e-mai protocol.Initially, Google will be the only Wave service provider, but it is hoped that, as the protocol becomes standardized and the prototype server becomes stable, other service providers will launch their own Wave services, possibly designing their own unique web-based clients as is common with many email service providers. The possibility also exists for native Wave clients to be made, as demonstrated by Google with their CLI-based console client.

Google has made an initial open-source release of some components of Wave:

1. the operational transformation (OT) code,
2. the underlying wave model, and
3. a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol

In addition, Google has provided some detail about the next phases of the open-source release:

1. wave model code that is a simplified version of Google's production code and is tied to the OT code; this code will evolve into the shared code base that Google will use and expects that others will too
2. a testing and verification suite for people who want to do their own implementation (for example, for porting the code to other languages).

Google is building APIs that allow developers to use and build on Google Wave by way of:

• Extensions, program robots to automate common tasks and/or build gadgets to extend or change user interaction (e.g., posting blips on microblog feeds or providing RSVP recording mechanisms).
• Embed, dropping interactive windows into a given wave on external site, blogs, etc.

Google wave Extensions are mainly of 2 types:

• Gadgets : A gadget is an application users can participate with, many of which are built on Google’s OpenSocial platform. A good comparison would be iGoogle gadgets or Facebook applications.

• Robots : Robots are automated participants within a wave. They can talk with users and interact with waves. They can provide information from outside sources (i.e. Twitter, stock quotes, etc.)