Google Wave

Just watched the preview of Google Wave. Its rightly described as a communication and collaborative tool. The basic idea is you start with a wave and add multiple participants to that wave, in order to share your communication. Pretty much like a bulletin board or forum, except much cooler and smarter.

Things I went “wow” about:

• Open Source: Yes, Wave is going to be open source and it has some amazing embed APIs. Personally, I love the idea of open source, simply because it’s collaborative.

• Real time: My jaws dropped when I watched this. Wave has real time character by character transfer as the conversation happens. Yes, no more of the dreaded “ is typing….” messages to wait on.

• Playback: Really useful feature that does a very simple thing. Plays back all messages in a conversation chronologically.

• Picture sharing: With waves, pictures can be part of your conversation. A simple drag and drop instantly transfers thumbnails to the other participants while the actual images upload.

• Embed into blogs: This one’s exceptionally cool; an incredible new twist to blogging. Drop a blog icon onto your waves, and the conversation is transformed as a blog post on your blog! And yes, as you edit your wave conversations, witness live updates on your blog!

• Collaboratively author documents

Once again, Google Rocks!