A new type of wave is coming. Not a wave from the deep blue or one from your friendly neighbors, rather a wave that is going to revolutionize the way that we communicate through the inter webs. This new wave form is powerful enough to destroy the former rule of email as the main source of communication over the internet. Google released their new Wave platform at this year’s Google IO keynote, where they displayed its ability to communicate from person to person and post information/content to a multitude of other services, all in REAL-TIME.

What is Google Wave?

With all of this talk about Google Wave annihilating today’s email dominance, you are all probably wondering what the Wave actually is. The best way to describe Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines the best features of email, social networking, instant messaging, wikis, and project management in order create one of the most effective productivity tools ever thought up. Google Wave makes all of this possible within the browser, allowing it to be used on the operating system and/or web browser of your choosing. Some of the highlight features include:

1. Real-time updates
2. Ability to be embedded
3. Extensions
4. Ability to function as a wiki
5. Open source
6. Smart spelling correction
7. Drag-and-drop capability

A few of the more complex features will be discussed below:

Real-Time Updates

Real-time is one of the biggest components to the Google Wave system. When typing in a wavelet, or conversation, every character that you type appears in the other user’s inbox as you make a keystroke. This takes both email and instant messaging to a new level. As stated in Google’s IO presentation of Wave, you spend most of your time while instant messaging staring at a window that says “Johnny Appleseed is typing…”. Now, the time needed to receive, process, and reply to a message is dramatically cut, increasing the effectiveness and productivity of a simple conversation.

Embedding

Any wavelet that you create or are a part of can be embedded in a website. The embedding of wavelets is still in its early stages, but many of the same functions that can be utilized in the main Wave client can be performed via an embedded wavelet, including dragging-and-dropping. Google has already created a YouTube playlist wavelet that can be embedded and discussed on a site other than YouTube. This could mean normal, static comments are soon to be replaced with real-time commenting systems powered by the Wave.

Extensions

In the Google Wave world, an extension is considered a mini-application that can operate within an individual wave conversation. In other words, extensions serve the purpose of augmenting, or increasing, the functionality of the Google Wave platform. The two main types of extensions are gadgets and robots, each of which serve a different purpose. Gadgets are extensions that Wave users can interact with, much like those applications used on the iGoogle user pages. Gadgets are not user specific as they are in iGoogle, rather they belong to each user participating in the conversation. Robots, or Wave Bots, are automated extensions that can be added to the conversation as a participant in order to achieve a certain goal. For example, Wave Bots can modify the content of the wavelet, interact with the users, draw information from other conversations, or pull information from outside sources. Some examples of robots that have already been developed and demoed are “Debuggy”, a debugger that can be used in waves, “Stocky”, which pulls stock prices based on mentions of stock quotes in the wave, and “Tweety”, which displays tweets within a wave conversation. The best part about both types of extensions is that anyone can develop new and innovative solutions due to the fact that Google Wave is all open-source.

Spelling Correction

Some of you are going to see this section and automatically think, “Why is he writing about this? It’s nothing new to the tech scene”. That’s where you’re wrong. Spelling auto-correct has been around for a while now, and has been implemented just about anywhere that text is used, but nothing like Google Wave’s algorithm has been seen. When typing in Google Wave, the platform is smart enough to detect both spelling errors, and confusion between words. For example, Google Wave has the capability to fix words with similar spellings, like “been” and “bean”, based on the context of the sentence that the word is used in.

Drag-and-Drop

Say goodbye to the hassle of attachments and welcome to instant drag-and-dropping files, documents, and media. With Google Wave sending and receiving documents becomes a piece of cake. Files will show up almost instantly on the computers of anyone involved in the wavelet conversation.