Wave bye-bye to FB, Wiki and Yahoo!Google Wave Debuts

Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.

 Initially released only to developers, a "preview release" of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite twenty to thirty additional users. On the 29th of November 2009, Google accepted most requests submitted soon after the extended release of the technical preview in September 2009, these users have around 8 invites to give.


Active session of Google Wave inside Google Chrome browserGoogle Wave is designed as a new Internet communications platform. It is written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Google Wave works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added to or removed from the wave at any point during a wave's existence.

Waves, described by Google as "equal parts conversation and document", are hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications. Any participant of a wave can reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave, and add participants at any point in the process. Each edit/reply is a blip and users can reply to individual blips within waves. Recipients are notified of changes/replies in all waves in which they are active and, upon opening a wave, may review those changes in chronological order. In addition, waves are live. All replies/edits are visible in real-time, letter by letter, as they are typed by the other collaborators. Multiple participants may edit a single wave simultaneously in Google Wave. Thus, waves can function not only as e-mails and threaded conversations but also as an instant messaging service when many participants are online at the same time. A wave may repeatedly shift roles between e-mail and instant messaging depending on the number of users editing it concurrently. The ability to show messages as they are typed can be disabled, similar to conventional instant messaging.


The ability to modify a wave at any location lets users create collaborative documents, edited in a manner akin to wikis. Waves can easily link to other waves. It is in many respects a more advanced forum.

Google has been actively collecting feedback with a user survey that was distributed via email through random sampling of Google Wave sandbox users. The survey results were posted on Google Waves blog on November 27th, 2009 and I must say I was really confused at how the results turned out since they seem to contradict one another. Here is a rundown of the survey results:




3 things most liked about Google Wave:

1) The concept of the wave

2) Ability to collaborate with others

3) All communications and documents can be integrated



3 main issues with Google Wave:

1) No one to wave with because friends or contacts don’t

have accounts

2) The platform is too slow

3) Integration with other tools such as email



The second and third likable feature for Google Wave should be a sub category under the first listed like feature “the concept of the wave”. If users are complaining (and this is the number one listed issue) they have no one to wave with because of limited invitations, how can they list their second most likable feature as the “ability to collaborate with others”?

The second contradiction to the survey results is the third listed liked feature “all communications and documents can be integrated”. Now if you look at the third listed main issue with Wave you see that “integration with other tools such as email” was requested. These results have left me really wondering what’s so great about Google Wave anyway? Sure the concept is great, most of us can agree on that, but I’m sure the concept of a $2 bill was great at one time also.

Google Wave has noted that they are organizing a team to work on the core issues and complaints users have pin-pointed in the survey such as trying to make Google Wave faster, integrate Wave with email, and trying to scale their systems to make it less complex. What can i say, Google has done it again