In a nutshell, Google Wave is an effort to combine everyone’s growing communication needs – email, chat, photo and video sharing, working with documents and spreadsheets and social networking – into one online platform.
What is Google Wave
According to the product’s official website, Google Wave is an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. The key tool is a wave, a kind of large chat window that can combine conversations and documents of two or more users. These users can work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and other media.
Key features of Google Wave:
- a wave is live,
- shared by various participants and
- is equal parts conversation and document.
Google Wave Glossary
Along with any new application or program come specific terms and abbreviations that describe detailed tasks and operations. Below is a first glossary of Google Wave terms:
- blip – a multimedia message
- Google Wave API – application programming interface, for example extensions, robots and gadgets
- Google Wave invite – invitation sent by Google to 100,000 initial Wave testers
- open protocol – anyone is allowed to customize and build upon the Google Wave protocol, allowing communication regardless of provider in the future
- open source – developed and extendable by the general public
- participant or collaborator – the user of a wave
- to wave – use Google Wave
- wave – XML documents containing text and conversation
- wave history – the order in which a wave was edited and by whom
About Google Wave
Google Wave was officially announced by Google at its I/O web developer conference on May 27, 2009 in San Francisco, CA as a "personal communication and collaboration tool." The Google Wave release date for a first preview for 100,000 invited users was September 30, 2009. Each test user can extend eight further invitations. A full consumer launch is planned for next year.
The name Google Wave was inspired by the 2002 US space western TV series Firefly. A wave in the series referred to an electronic communication, often a video call or video message. As a tribute to the series that was cancelled after only 11 episodes, Google Wave uses the popular quote "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal” from the series as its crash message.
Those who would like a Google Wave demo can go to the official website and view the detailed Google Wave video. Those convinced that they want to try it out will have to wait with the Google Wave download a bit but can request an invitation for a Google Wave account here too - about one million people have done so to date. If Google Wave will create just ripples or waves indeed, revolutionizing the way people use the Internet, is yet to be seen.
Readers interested in this topic may also enjoy the articles Using Twitter for Beginners, Decoding Text Messaging Lingo or What Is Project Gutenberg?.
Resources:
- “About Google Wave.” Google Wave Preview. Retrieved from wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html.
- “Google Wave.” Wikipedia. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave.
- Wakefield, Jane. “Google Invites Users to Join Wave.” BBC News, Sept. 30. Retrieved from news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8280864.stm.
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