Google, the internet giant had recently announced the launch of Google Wave at the Google I/O conference last month.

If you are thinking that this would be just another social networking platform, then you’re mistaken! Known for its innovations, this latest offering from Google will definitely send ripples in the world of online communication and interaction.

So what exactly is Google Wave all about?

Imagine Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and Friendfeed all combined into one. Well, that’s what the team behind Google Wave had in mind when it started building a prototype two years ago.

As Google itself puts it, “Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.”

The idea is to bridge the gap between different forms of online communication like email and IM by using a single platform for ‘real time’ interaction.

How will it help you?

Well, if you use email, IM, micro blogging, photo sharing, online collaboration tools, maps etc. you would no longer have to use them all separately. Google Wave would get them all at a single place. With Google Wave, you can create a ‘wave’ and add your friends, colleagues or just about anyone you want and start communicating in ‘real time’ with the help of richly formatted text, gadgets, photos and feeds from multiple other sources on the internet.

Okay, but what’s so different about it?

Google Wave would take online communication to a whole new level. To give you an idea, you would be able to watch other people in your wave type and edit in real time as if you are sitting right next to them, thanks to concurrent rich-text editing!
You can work with your colleagues on that all important presentation, discussing, making changes and doing it all in real time using Google Wave. Communicate, interact, and collaborate all at once!

Is that all?

With Google Wave, you can “playback” or rewind the wave and see the project or wave right from the beginning. You can see who did what, when and how. Of course, there would be privacy settings to ensure that you have control over who does and sees what.

Google Wave brings in several useful features that can really change the way you communicate and interact online.

• Embed the waves into your websites, blogs, etc.
• See each and every character that people in your wave are typing, as they type.
• With the playback option, you can add people to your wave at any point, not just at the start or end. The other users subscribed to the wave can rewind and go through the entire conversation.
• Edit messages written by you or any other user. The original author is notified (like Wiki). Other users can replay the wave and make changes.
• No need to attach any files. Simply drag and drop files into the wave for everyone to view and share it.
• Get suggestions for spellings through natural language tools

You can use audio, video, images, rich text all at once. Based on the Gmail philosophy, where you don’t have to delete a message, you can export your wave if it gets too big and just continue from there.

Open platform means endless possibilities

Google has made Wave open for developers to create and add to its usefulness before throwing it open to the public. Google Wave would support all the gadgets of iGoogle or OpenSocial. The gadgets can be used by everyone on the wave and would not be limited to a single user.

Google Wave has some useful built in gadgets like Maps to organise an event, Bloggy to turn your blog post into a wave, Polly to help you embed a poll into a wave, Spelly to get your spellings right, etc. Expect some real interactive games to be developed using the Wave platform.

It’s still some time for Google Wave to reach the public shore

While Google Wave is open for developers, users will have to wait for a while before it goes live to the public. Google would also want to launch it at the earliest to ensure that it stays ahead of the competition.

Wave or Grave?

While Google Wave looks promising, there are many who are concerned about its security, reliability and most of all, its usefulness. Social networking sites are prone to virus attacks and various other security threats. With so much personal information at stake, the concerns are not unwarranted.

Google Wave would have to store and manage extremely large volumes of data while ensuring that there are no service outages. The internet bandwidth requirements would also be considerably higher for Google Wave, raising serious concerns about its usage in countries like India, where majority of the users still do not have fast broadband connections.

If you would like to get the latest updates on Google wave, you can sign up here

We’ll also keep you posted about the developments right here on Digimouth.