Eye on Technology: Google Wave

Have you ever felt as if technology is leaving you behind? That when you finally learn and understand something, you are frustrated by the fact that there is something else you have understand in order to move forward with the product you just learned to use? It is as if you will never complete the task of pushing the stone up the hill only to have it roll back down the hill.

I feel your pain.

If you are a business and have the budget for it, you have a Technology Consultant, or a Tech guy or women. If you are someone that is not a business person but, you are using technology enough to get done what you need to. Then, you probably have a friend that knows about this stuff and, you ask them the questions “How does this work?”, " Why is it not working?”Or “What can I do with this?” While it is nice to have someone around to answer these questions, they may not always be there and, like everyone else you need a resource to give you some direction or answers to your current technology dilemma.




This is the objective of this blog. To give you direction and that it be the resource you need and, can use.


As of now the internet has evolved into what is known as Web 2.0 One of the products I want to explore with you is something that I believe with change the Web and, how we interact with each other. This product is called Google Wave.



You might ask What the Heck is Google Wave? How will it affect me and, what I am doing?


These are good questions that we will attempt to answer.


Google Wave is a communication platform bringing together Chat, Instant Message, Forum, Wiki and, Email. Google Wave is a document (called the wave) that captures the conversation; it allows you to reply to the conversation, have private conversations between selected parties, invite others to the conversation. Those individuals that want to catch-up on what was said earlier will have the ability to find out through utilizing the obtaining the full history of that conversation. You will be able to communicate, share photos
, videos and, formatted text. This platform will allow you to have live conversations.


This new platform will allow for conversations to happen in “Real Time”.


Google Wave interacts with Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla; if you are a web designer then you know what this means and how this technology may impact what you do and how you do it.
If this product works the way it is said to work, it will change things and, not just in the Technology world. From live collaboration to Natural language tools, to Social Gadgets, some of us will be in for a shock to the system.


Google is still a developers product but, September 30, 2009 Google Wave is available to a few invited individual much like Gmail in its infancy. The developer community and invited guest are testing this product as we speak
The Product Rollout to the General Public will happen sometime in 2010. Some and including this blogger say that this product maybe a change in the way things are done on the web.



There are six items within googlewave that lead me to believe that this product will change the web and how we communicate.


Wiki Style Function
GoogleWave allows you to change the message you may send to someone in this respect it works a lot like email but, you should be aware that you can also change the message of anyone within the wave (the current document); you can reorganize the conversation string and, reply to any part of the conversation string. This is called concurrent editing and, will allow individual within the conversation string to reply to, make changes to the same conversation much like you do if you were speaking face to face and, allow collaboration to happen much more easily because it is all in real time. Add video, and photos you have a real way to get things done. Whether is a planning of a birthday party to see who is coming, to working on research for a new product, to a possible live conversation with a political candidate? This changes things in a real way.


Wave Extensions
This Feature allows for 3rd parties to develop apps much like you see working with twitter or facebook. Also, if you involved in a project you will be able to utilize project management tools from within the Wave (Conversation). There are two types of extensions robots and gadgets, what I described earlier are calling a gadget. The robot is an automated smart conversation participant, which can detect keywords. They can respond to those keywords and bring in outside information from services like Friendfeed or Twitter. This feature will allow you to use Google wave as an All-in-one conversation tool.

Drag and drop file uploads
Documents can be quickly shared in the Google wave environment, simply by dragging the file from the desktop or file manager and dropping it in the conversation, photos are shown in an album format and music can be played. All these things are shared very quickly. Using this feature in a file sharing platform, with a project management tool or system. This will allow for the development of project management tool more powerful than anything on the market.


Wave Embeds
You able to place within a Website a Wave (conversation), to customize that site for many purposes. It will be easy to share conversations, and possibly chat rooms or how about changing the way you do customer service using this technology.


Playback
If you are added to the conversation late you are playing catch-up. This feature allows you to just do that Catch-up on what was said so that you can proceed to participate fully in the conversation. Someone can get caught up in a matter of minutes instead of hours, just playback the conversation.


Open source
This product is open sourced which means is this environment will foster innovation because developers will be able to, improve and make changes to code for quick adoption and develop a better product.


You may say this is all good but, if the public does like it because of too many bugs, problems, or causes too many major problems on the network, (enterprise or smaller) then, the product will be useless.


Is Google wave ready to be introduced to the world?


That is something we will all have to wait and see. I for one love the concept and will be watching and learning like everyone else.



I believe Google will be successful.