Potential tsunami or ripple? Google signal the WAVEing goodbye of Twitter

Global recession or not, the pace of internet technology development waits for no economic cycle it would seem. Recently google have announced their latest project – something that’s potentially so big they’ve broken with their usual “release it in beta & then keep working on it” approach and have started drawing attention to it months before it’ll be ready for public release. Google Wave promises to be a “new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year”.

Twitter killer? Certainly looks like to me. It’s gonna dent the hell out of FaceBook & other such platforms too you’d have to bet.  So what is Wave – well in their own words:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. 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. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

And here’s the video of it being launched

you can find all of this and more (including signing up to be alerted when it is launched) at http://wave.google.com/

It is of course pretty scary if you let yourself think about how much more of the “conversation” & our data this will put within the google domain – and you have to wonder how anyone can now stop them becoming the MegaCorp of many sci-fi nightmares that humans eventually have to rise up and rally against – but right here right now I take my hat off to the visionary and mega clever people at google and pray that the ATS market is way too small, for a few years at least, for them to bother knocking out a killer beta app for that! *Gulp*

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Comments

[Matt]

Well if there is such a thing as a Twitter killer this certainly fits the bill! I'm continually amazed by the game changing usefulness of many of the tools coming onto the market at the moment. As I've said before, there is a revolution going on that is going to change everything ;-)

Interesting that Google staged managed the timing of this announcement to upstage the Microsoft Bing press conference that was also happening yesterday!

[Lis Wilson]

Gosh - it just keeps developing and at such a rapid rate. If it keeps this speed up - we will be living in a sci fi movie before the end of the decade!

I have to wonder though, how long it will take for the majority internet users to catch on & as google chrome still keeps crashing my PC, how stable is this app going to be?

Still very clever!

[Lindsay Hartley]

Wave does look like it's going to be incredibly useful for a whole range of uses, from chatting with friends to interactive online meetings.

"Interesting that Google staged managed the timing of this announcement to upstage the Microsoft Bing press conference that was also happening yesterday!"

I'm sure it was a complete accident! ;)