Google Wave Better Late Than Never
Okay, so maybe I’m a tad behind the times (I’ve been really busy, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it), but it wasn’t until today while reading Mighty Oak Marketing‘s latest ezine issue that I heard about the upcoming “Google Wave.”
It’s not available, yet, but according to the preview site (which says very little but has this cool video shown below), they are looking to pull together a massive amount of social media marketing and collaboration tools. Just the thing for Google fans in particular, and (perhaps?) marketers.
Here’s an excerpt from Google (also compliments of Mighty Oak Marketing so I didn’t have to dig around myself), that may or may not explain what you have to look forward to:
“Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.”
Thankfully Nancy Verini sums it up very nicely in her current (as of September 10th) front page:
“A wave is a threaded conversation, consisting of one or more participants, which may be both human and robot. Great, we’re networking with robots! Will robots buy scented candles, nutritional supplements, or any other quality products? It goes on to say that a wave is a living thing with participants communicating and modifying the wave in real time. Well thank goodness it will do it all in real time! Also, a wave serves as a container for one or more wavelets. Do we have to buy Cyber Tupperware?
Further explanation reveals that you can spawn a wavelet from within a wave, but you don’t inherit any access permissions from the parent wavelet. I’m a little afraid to pursue a computer process that will give the world the power to spawn.”
There’s much more to it, and I hope you hop over to read Nancy’s front page quickly. I’m not 100% sure she archives issues or not.
Be that as it may, it does appear that Google’s onto something “new” meshing current technology perhaps with a unique twist. They do tell us it’s sometimes better to reinvent the mouse trap then to try to think of something completely original.
Will this be a tool that catches on? Will people really hop onboard and catch the wave? We’ve got months to find out, but it should be interesting.
For additional information, you can always check out these related reading materials to get your game face (at least) ready:
About Google Wave
What is Google Wave (developers encouraged)
Google Wave Federation Protocol
Haven’t tried Google Wave either. So that makes the two of us now.
I wonder what’s new with this one…