Stephanie Hannon, a product manager on the Google Wave team, shows off some functions of the new online communication and collaboration tool released during Thursday morning's keynote at the Google I/O developer's conference in San Francisco, Calif.
Inside Wave, users can collaborate on shared data like soliciting polls and opinion from the shared contacts, like this example of the type of thing developers might build using the Google API.
In the works for years, and spearheaded by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who created Where 2 Tech, a company Google bought and which eventually turned into Google Maps, Google Wave blends e-mail and instant messaging into a rich new form of online discussions. It is an attempt to "combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication," said Lars Rasmussen.
Multiple users can edit a document simultaneously in real time. Here, Casey and Dan, designated by their colored name tiles, are both typing and editing inside the document at the same time.
Part e-mail, part IM, conversations appear in Google Wave as they are being typed, without the standard "Lars is typing..." tagline that appears in most IM clients.
Documents can be edited collaboratively, and changes can be seen by all. Loop someone new into the Wave, and they can watch all the previous changes made using the timeline feature.
Developers will also be able to build widgets inside Wave, like this chess game. Previous changes to documents, conversations, and even games can be viewed in a playback mode. Here, the game has been rewound, and is re-playing the moves of the chess match using the player at the top of the window.
Outside communications platforms like Twitter can be integrated into Google Wave. Wave is designed to be open-source code and is built on Google Web Toolkit using HTML 5. Google hopes developers will use the open nature of Wave to build upon and within it, integrating it with other Web content and applications.
