What Is Google Wave?

Google Wave is Google's new toy for 2009 with the idea to reinvent email for 2009 and beyond. You might ask, but what's wrong with email? Afterall, email is still the number one choice for communicating online. The short answer to this question is: nothing is wrong with email..

But, there is one vital drawback with email in its present form, this is where Google Wave comes in.

Email for today's world

This drawback is simple, email is based on traditional systems, which were designed well before the Internet ever existed. Google Wave is email re-invented for the digital age, with modern technology, utilizing modern platforms.

Social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook offer partial real-time communication, with even newer brands such as Twitter taking this idea one step further. However, although these are all great sites and great ideas none of them are really designed for real-time communication, and more importantly they are not frameworks. Google Wave on the other hand is designed for real-time communication and secondly Google Wave is an API. Google Wave is designed from the ground up for real-time, word for word, character for character online communication.

This is where Google Wave comes in. Google Wave provides a fully integrated, real-time communication environment to talk with groups of people, whilst taking into consideration all the real-life conversation complexities we take for granted as human-beings. As seen in the Google Wave conference the open source API strives to provide all the delicate state changes that can occur during a real-life conversation. Examples include when someone new is added to the conversation and they may or may not need to catch up on what's been said previously. This intially sounds like nothing new to those experienced with messenger software such as MSN Messenger and Google Talk although it's the way Google Wave provides the functionality that separates Google Wave from existing communication frameworks.