Google Wave....Will it be the email of the 21st Century?

Goggle began sending out invites this week to people to become the first users of their latest internet tool  Google Wave, which aims to rival Twitter, Facebook and even conventional e-mail.

Google Wave allows a limitless number of internet users anywhere in the world to connect in clusters, or waves, to discuss topics, share photos and files, edit documents and chat. The service combines aspects of email, instant messaging, social networking and web chat and is aimed at friends catching up with one another and business partners sharing documents.

Users can join a wave, a group of web users, to have a discussion or share photos or documents. Everyone in the wave can see what other users are typing and any document placed into the wave can be accessed by all the users at the same time. However, I'm not sure if colleagues working on the same document at the same time and seeing every change being made to the document in real time is a very productive process.

Among suggested uses for Google Wave are for organizing trips, laboratory record-keeping and journalism. It was developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers behind Google Maps.

The initial 100,000 users that received the invite are those that had signed up to a waiting list to try out Google Wave. No I am not one of them. It will be open to everyone in 2010, so I guess we'll just have to wait till then. However I did view the preview video that Google has posted here if you'd like to check it out as well. I warn you though; it is an hour-and-20-minute presentation Google gave to developers back in May.

A spokesman for Google touted the service as 'how email would look if it was invented today', adding: 'It would be collaborative and there would be no barriers between live instant messaging, email and documents and so on. That is what Google Wave is - email for the 21st century.'

So whether Google Wave will be the "Wave of the Future" is hard to say. It is however a sign that points towards the merging of different forms of communications.... social network updates, tweets, instant messages, blogging and blog comments, email chains, wikis, etc. The Wave is another emerging media platform that is really a potpourri of what exists today.

Comments

[Yvonne]

Donna, thanks for explaining Google Wave. I've been a bit confused about it. Am not sure I'd care to have everyone in a group watching every keystroke... and what if you make an error (in judgment...) - you can't hit delete because everyone will see it as you write it.

This may have its uses, I'm not going to jump on it, however. I need more information and I'd like to see it tested more. We'll see how the general public uses it and what they say about it.

[Donna DeClemente]

Well we now have the first 100,000 users playing with it so we'll have to see what they say besides what the internal Google folks are saying. If you watch the video presentation you'll see some cool thing that can be done now right in a browser. Although not all browsers are compatible. Firefox I believe is.

But yes I agree Yvonne, I'm a little nervous about having my content displayed in real time before I get a chance to read it over and edit it. It'll be the writers vs. the techies I guess that will probably determine which features of the Wave rise to the top.