In designing Google Wave, Google asked the question, "What would e-mail look like if it were invented today?" Certainly, technology has come a long way since e-mail's invention in 1965, and in the past decade, the Internet has exploded with new ways to share information and collaborate.
Google Wave takes the next step in online collaboration by expanding the idea of e-mail to include the ability to keep track of the e-mail history, add multiple users, collaborate on documents, add images and video, track individual threads within the Google Wave history and much, much more.
What is Google Wave
Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration web-based service that operates on a real-time platform. Whew! That's a mouthful. What does it mean? With the aim of taking e-mail to the next level, Google Wave allows you to send messages to friends or co-workers, collaborate on documents through the messages, embed images, video and other documents, and add other participants for group collaboration.
Google Wave happens in real-time, which means you'll be able to see changes as they happen. You can embed a Google Wave on any blog or website, and you can extend the wave through custom apps and widgets embedded within the wave. And because it tracks its history, you can play back the Wave, seeing the changes that have happened over the course of days or weeks.
Google Wave Embed
One of the first things many will notice about Google Wave is the ability to embed different objects within the document like Flickr images or YouTube videos. Think of the flexibility we have in creating a blog post with images and video and apply that to e-mail.
But going further, the Google Wave itself can be embedded on a website, which creates an interesting portability. For example, you could embed a Google Wave on your blog to collaborate on a project with your visitors, or embed a Wave on your company intranet to collaborate on a project's documentation.
Google Wave Gadgets
Gadgets are small pieces of code that run as fully-functional applications within the Google Wave. These gadgets are the same as iGoogle gadgets and widgets that conform to the OpenSocial standard, so there are already thousands of Gadgets that are compatible with Google Wave.
Some of the Gadgets already available include Google Maps, Flixster movies, a to do list gadget, NY Times Crossword, TV Guide among many, many others.
Google Wave Robots
A Google Wave Robot is like an automated person participating in the Wave. These programmable extensions will be able to automate simple tasks such as running spellchecks to more complicated tasks like bringing information in from Twitter or other third-party sources.
You can define robots based on events, which can kick off a specific behavior within the robot. For example, changes in the text could kick off a spellcheck. There are already several robots in production, including a debugger, a Twitter robot and a robot that pulls in stock prices.
Google Wave Expandability
Google Wave is an open source project, which means the community of developers can expand the project and take it in new directions. It should also help Google Wave become adopted among the developer community, which will lead to more products (gadgets, robots, etc) being built around Google Wave.