Technical Assignment #1

Google Wave

The unbeatable Google has come up with yet another present for the masses. Google announces –“a personal communication and collaboration tool” pronounced-Google Wave. Waves as described by Google is "equal parts conversation and document". It is the new Internet communications platform wrapping up e-mail, instant messaging , wikis and social networking in to one box. Waves works like any other messaging or emailing system without needing to store the responses in the user’s inbox for context. In this the complete threads of multimedia messages called blips is stored on a central server. Any participant of a wave can reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave (i.e message document), and add participants at any point in the process.

Google plans to release most of the source code as open source, allowing the public to develop its features through extensions as it wants the Wave protocol to replace the e-mail protocol. Waves are alive, all action on waves are visible in real time, letter by letter. Thus, it can function not only as e-mails and threaded conversations but also as an instant messaging service when many participants are online at the same time. Collaborative documents can be easily created by editing a wave at any location by the participants. Waves can link very easily to another wave. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.Being an open protocol, anyone can use it to build a custom Wave system and become a wave provider. A key feature of the protocol is that waves are stored on the service provider's servers instead of being sent between users. Waves are federated; copies of waves and wavelets are distributed by the wave provider of the originating user to the providers of all other participants in a particular wave or wavelet so all participants have immediate access to up-to-date content. The originating wave server is responsible for hosting, processing, and concurrency control of waves. Google Wave was launched to nearly 1,00,000 users on September 30,2009. It is still in active development and is expected to remain in development until later in 2009.

Besides this that could be gathered from Wikipedia there is a developer preview and overview videos available on YouTube.

All said and done if you like me cant resist trying it out, the best thing to do is to request for an invitation on the following link and keep your fingers crossed…

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

Happy Waving!!! :)