Google Wave – A social media tsunami or Google just flexing their muscles?

 What if you could mix your emails, your chat program and other social media together into a single application? Imagine a tool designed purely to help us fulfill our dreams of digital omnipresence – so that that we can all finally become a master of all domains… Well, the brilliant minds at Google have developed what the IT and media crowds are pegging as the next big thing – “Google Wave”. A few people have described it as “turning email on its head” and Google spokespeople describe it as E-mail developed for the users of today-rather than 40 years ago (when email was first developed). So let’s take a look at what Google Wave is all about! A wave – in essence – is always moving, ever changing and never still; it is truly dynamic. What Google has done is to turn emails, which are considered ‘static’, into something that’s more dynamic. For all intents and purposes Wave is a glorified IM/Chat program (such as MSN, Yahoo Messenger and AIM). The major difference being that it mixes IM & chat with emails, and has potential for rich media such as large file videos/pictures and the ability to communicate with new ‘fads’ such as downloading and updating one’s twitter status’. Here’s an example of how the whole ‘Wave’ process works. Here’s a brief example of how it can work for you [from Mack Collier’s website “The Viral Garden”]. “I can create a Wave that’s 5 paragraphs, and send it to Beth. Beth can then go in and break up the Wave and reply to each paragraph. I can then reply to each point Beth made. Now let’s say at this point we decide that we want to bring Amy and Jason into our Wave and get their ideas on what we’ve been talking about. First, they are going to see a Wave that’s probably confusing as hell, because it will be my original 5-paragraph Wave, which was then broken into 5 parts (where Beth replied to each paragraph), and then I replied to each of Beth’s replies. So it looks like a complete cluster to anyone that joins the Wave at this point. But Google Wave would give Amy and Jason the ability to ‘replay’ the wave and see how it was created. They could first see the 5-paragraph wave I wrote, then see Beth break it down into replies for each paragraph, them my replies to her replies. So it’s less confusing” Source: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-first-date-with-google-wave.html One hundred thousand (that’s 100,000) public invites were sent out on 30th September this year and don’t worry too much if you weren’t one of those lucky ones. You can sign up with this link below or wait for someone to contact you/wait for the wave to reach you eventually! https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/ Both Google’s press release information and the experience of beta users reveal a lot of excitement but in varied cases it seems to be a lot of hype about something we can potentially (and currently) do without. It is however an application that may become a standard amongst other e-mail providers such as Live hotmail and Yahoo Mail – so that’s where the value lies. However unless there are a few improvements between now and the launch date, I will stick with the old, static, snail (e)mail.…(more...)

Tags: chat, email, Google, IM, social media, Wave, web technology

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