Google Announces the WAVE of the Future!
Over the last 40 or 50 years, we’ve seen a variety of technology become popular only to have it’s position as ‘state of the art’ usurped by the ‘next big thing’. Records gave way to 8-track tapes, which led to cassette tapes, then cd’s and now MP3s and other digital forms. It happens all the time. And now, it may just happen to e-mail.
St. Louis’ Riverfront Times has a great article by Bill Streeter on the ‘next big thing’ to take the place of email: Google Wave. Wave is more than just email, it’s a real-time communication tool. Think of it as part email, chat, wiki, file sharing and more, all rolled into one.
From www.DailyRFT.com“Here is a scenario you might find familiar. You’re emailing back and forth with another party, and you soon discover that the other person is actually responding to you in real time. When this happens in a Wave, the messages automatically becomes a chat. Or how about this, if a coworker sends you notes on a project with several bullet points in it and you want to respond to just one of the points, in a Wave you can just highlight the one thing you need to respond to and hit reply and your reply appears just below the point that you are responding to. What happens is that a Wave becomes more than an exchange as in email, it’s a conversation that happens on a single document.”
One of the best things about Google Wave? Google is making it open source. Which means that there are going to be a lot of exciting new tools that will make it even better.
Wanna know more? Check out this abridged version of the Google Wave demo:
You can read the full article at the Riverfront Times site (www.dailyrft.com) for more information and a link to the full Google wave presentation (it’s over one hour long!).
Personally, I’m pretty excited for this. I’m a semi-tech junkie; I want new tech, but only if I can see right away how it’s going to relate to my daily life. I was late on the Facebook/Twitter/whole social media thing, because I didn’t know how it fit. But this…all I can say is, “WOW!” I know exactly how this will fit and keep thinking of all the great uses for it.
Like the long progession from vinyl records to iPods, this surely looks like it’s the ‘next big thing’ for email (and files sharing and wiki and…?????)
Excited for the next big thing from Google? Tell us what you think? Just leave your comment below!
This looks so great – Leave it to Google to have the next big thing already in their bag..
I wonder how it will interface with more traditional systems? Will we need to save our waves “…to text” so we can “CC” our parents?
Hopefully they’ll keep the interface clean, and their learning curve shallow…
I’m hoping it will revolutionize the way I communicate with my clients. Currently I work in shared google docs and this is how we track the revisions that need to be made and my input on each of their decisions. They usually get quite long and we all have to pick a different color to represent who is saying what. So wave will make this sooo much easier!