Google Wave Coming to a Browser Near You
Mashable’s Ben Parr has an interesting writeup on Google Wave, a new application unvieled at the Google I/O conference and scheduled for release “later this year.”
Created by two of the guys behind Google Maps (Google Maps reviews) with a small team in Sydney, the concept behind Google Wave is to “unify” communication on the web. It’s a hybrid of email, web chat, IM, and project management software. It features the ability to replay conversations because it records the entire sequence of communication, character by character. Because of this, discussions are also live in Google Wave: you will see your friends type character-by-character.
The features don’t stop there, either. Google Wave also supports the ability to drag attachments from your desktop into Google Wave. It loads that file and sends it immediately to anyone in the conversation. It’s also embeddable, so you can embed Google Wave conversations on any blog.
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The key to it all is the faster line of communication. Attaching documents, like you do in email, is unnecessary in Google Wave. Real-time conversations and collaboration make it an ideal tool for business teams as well. Imagine an entire office having Google Wave open to quickly share and receive files. It combines some of people’s favorite aspects of many different web communication tools.
I don’t use chat all that much but the overall integration of communication tools sounds worthwhile. Frankly, I’d be happy if Google did a better job of integrating Gmail with Picasa, Reader, Calendar, and other popular apps. For example, I’d like to be able to “star” things anywhere and access them from any of the apps. Similarly, I’d like to be able to easily add items to the calendar based on emailed invites.
I think the calendar deal is already integrated–I get emails all the time with dates in them and on the right side of the screen you will get an automated prompt to add it to your calendar. You also get a google maps link related to addresses in the email message.
ALso when you get attachements to emails, there are always prompts to save them to google docs. I don’t know about photos.
Can’t you already do all of this integration promised in Wvae via a customized iGoogle page with gadgets?
I guess the problem with the entire enterprise of integrating everything is that you can get a pretty cluttered screen!
Ya think? My eyes ache just looking at the screen capture.