I wrote a “short” blog post on Highly Relevant about the eventual release of Google Wave in September of 2009. The Wave is Google’s attempt at “what if email were created today” and there are obviously a million ways that can go consider email was created over 40 years ago.
There were three main things about the Google Wave that really were quite remarkable to me and I’m excited to see them when they are “beyond beta”.
Google Wave Playback
The wave has a new, amazing feature that really will change the way people communicate and collaborate online for business as well. The Google Wave Playback feature allows you to view conversations, edits, comments, and the like on documents, emails, and conversations so you can see not only the end results but previous additions that give you much more insight than just the finished project. Additionally, you can view a single user’s comments so you can track what individuals are contributing. The best part is the Wave allows you to easily extract the finished project/attachment/email/document/etc and re-distribute as needed. This will revolutionize the way documents and communication are edited while providing more insight and information to the decision makers so they can see exactly what went right and what went wrong.
Drag & Drop
The Wave allows you to drag and drop images, videos, documents, music, and more into your web browser. What’s interesting is this is NOT included in the HTML 5 standards (but Google says it soon will be) so this is going to be some technology I can honestly say nobody has ever seen…
APIs and Open Source
Google is smart — we all know this. They continue to show their intellect by harnessing prior successes into new success. They have the Rasmussen brothers, who developed a little something called Google Maps, spearheading the Wave and like with Maps, have opened the door to over 4,000 Developer’s to begin building applications, extensions, plugins, and the like to allow for such 3rd party extensions to work seamlessly with Google’s new Wave.
Read more about the Google Wave Playback feature & more including screenshots of the Wave
