On September 30th of 2009, Google launched Wave, a real-time communication platform that is robust and best of all open-source.
What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is many things, but to paraphrase it into one line, Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more… You can bring together groups of friends, clients, or business partners together (in real-time) to discuss how your project is going, share files by simply dragging and dropping (everyone will have instant access), or simply discuss how your day is progressing.
What is a Wave?
A wave is a conversation with multiple participants — participants are people added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. Participants can reply any time and anywhere within a wave, and they can edit content and add more participants as a wave develops. It’s also possible to rewind waves with the playback functionality, to see what happened, and when.
Technological Snap-shot:
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
The