Wave goodbye to email?

I recently watched a fascinating presentation on Google’s new application – Wave. It will be available later this year but was launched for developers a few weeks ago. You can see the presentation of its launch in the video below.

It’s certainly impressive. Its developers describe it as the email we would have now if we designed it now from scratch – “intelligently designed” instead of the clunky “evolved” email we currently use!

It operates from one’s browser. As well as email it enables instant messaging, instant email conversation, on-line instant collaboration on documents, concurrent document editing, discussion boards, etc. I guess this is part of the move to using on-line, instead of desktop-based, applications.

Discussion, on-line collaboration and instant messaging have playback functions enabling movement to different edited situations in a document. A bit like history in Photoshop.

As someone who has spent a fair amount of frustrating time collaborating on research papers, reviewing papers and otherwise editing documents I think the powerful document production functions in Wave are going to be great.

Wave also integrates with data sources, presentation software and on-line forms of communication and social networking like blogging and twitter. It enables, for instance, integration of email, on-line discussion and blog commenting.

The application is largely open source and developers can write their own extensions and add-ons. The video demonstrate two such extensions – a powerful context driven spell checker and an instant translation facility. Just imagine communicating via instant conferencing/email/collaboaration with someone in a different country, using a different language!

The developers’ presentation (video below) shows examples of how Wave performs in practical situations.

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See also:
Take a sneak peek
Let me know when it’s ready
New Zealand PC World Magazine > Google’s Wave consolidates core online features in one tool
What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?
Google Wave: A Complete Guide

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