Google Wave Early Developer Release

Let the Wave Begin. On Wednesday September 30, 2009, Google will release what it is calling the next generation of email to about 100,000 users. What Google is calling “Wave,” is what they are using to achieve this.

Lars Rusmussen, the co-creator of Google Maps and co-creator of wave, “While email is an incredibly successful protocol, we can use computing advances to do better. Wave is our answer”.

The main question is, what is it?

Wave in the simplest form is “a personal communications and collaboration tool” which was announced by Microsoft back in May during the Google I/O conference.

Designed to merge E-mail, Instant messaging, wiki’s and other social networking in a real time based scenario, so real time, that it types the letters for everyone to see as you are typing them, automatic translations between 40 languages and a bunch load of other gizmo’s and gadgets.

The Wave is touted to be a complete interactive collaborative online tool. Using Google’s famed cloud technology all based on the XML messaging protocol XMPP. From email, to IM, to online meetings and voice communitarians it can do it. Wave protocols are very open, you can build wave clients or a wave server in flash, silver light, or any other technology as long as it supports Wave Federation Protocol.

Crafted in Java using the Google Web toolkit, instead of sending messages and its entire thread of previous messages all objects (conversations) are stored in “Waves” which contain the complete thread on the central server, which can be modified or delete at any point during the “waves” existence, making it the job of the servers to keep the end points in sync.

Much like everything Google create, this being no exception, its open source so third party applications can be developed, tested, and implemented.

As an earlier adopter of Gmail, Google sites, and Grand Central (now called Google Voice) I requested an early beta account for Google Wave!

I am excited about it, I think a new area of communication beyond, Email, beyond, instant messaging, and beyond the infamous Facebook is upon us, and Google is leading the way.

Google Wave, Google Voice, Google Sites, Gmail and all Pictures are copyright of Google Inc. information gathered from various websites that may or may not be affiliated with Google. All opinions are of the author also not affiliated with Google.

Eric Wiegand

Founder
Focus: Web design, General Tech
Credentials: Network Analyst IV
B.S. from University of Pittsburgh