Search giant Google has unveiled ambitious proposals to rethink the way people communicate online. Google Wave promises to mix together email, IM, online docs and other social media platforms in one browser window.
Writing on the official Google blog, Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager described Wave as, “equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”
The app enables users to communicate in real-time, similar to instant messaging but with much more functionality. “In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it,” said Rasmussen. “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.”
Each ‘wave’ contains a rich set of open APIs, Google said, enabling developers to embed waves in other web services. Waves can also be rewound so users can see how it evolved. The format will be open source and Google is encouraging developers to create apps for the service.
Rasmussen, who helped develop the platform, said that the idea behind Google Wave was to examine what email would look it if it were developed today.
“Two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analogue formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls,” he said. “Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved.”
Rasmussen added that Google Wave takes all these developments as a starting point.
The full release of Google Wave is expected later this year.
