[Year 12 SofDev] Google Wave

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.
 
5/28/2009, 09:15:00, http://googleblog.blogspot.com


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

Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave & add people to it. 

Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and 
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 both collaboration and communication. 

You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to 
make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community 
to get involved. 

Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we're inviting developers to 
add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. 

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. 

So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else 
can we do with this?

After months in a conference room in the Sydney office, our five-person 
"startup" team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two 
years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we're very eager 
to return and see what the world might think. Today we're giving 
developers an early preview of Google Wave.

If you're a developer and you'd like to roll up your sleeves and start 
working on Google Wave with us, you can read more on the Google Wave 
Developer blog about the Google Wave APIs, and check out the Google Code 
blog to learn more about the Google Wave Federation Protocol. 

If you'd like to be notified when we launch Google Wave as a public 
product, you can sign up at http://wave.google.com/. 

We don't have a specific timeframe for public release, but we're planning 
to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a 
developer preview. We're excited to see what feedback we get from our 
early tinkerers, and we'll undoubtedly make lots of changes to the Google 
Wave product, platform, and protocol as we go.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Update @ 7:07PM: The video of the Google Wave keynote presentation is now 
available.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-
wave.html

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Cheers,
Stephen