Google Wave Sneak Peek

On day 2 at Google I/O 2009, Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering at Google, talked about their new product called Google Wave. Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web, coming later this year. 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.

Here's a preview of just some of the aspects of this new tool.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

How Wave Works ?

In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Some key technologies in Google Wave

Real-time collaboration : Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time. Watch the tech video

Natural language tools : Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction. Watch the tech video

Extending Google Wave : Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets, thanks to Google Wave APIs.

Google Wave Layers

Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

• The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave). 
• Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
• The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Have a look at Google Wave Developer Preview presentation at the Day 2 Keynote of Google I/O by Vic Gundotra.