Next Generation Email – Google Wave
Posted on June 2nd, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,348 views
One of the hottest and most exciting new software products previewed just last week on May 29, is Google Wave, which is Google’s answer to the question, “What would email look like, if it were developed from scratch using today’s technologies?”
The same team that developed Google maps brings us Google Wave, the next generation of email which combines modern communications technologies such as email, instant messaging, document collaboration,and social networking into one online server hosted object called a Wave.
So where did they get the word ‘wave’ from? It turns out that one of the lead developers, Lars Rasmussen, is an avid fan of the Firefly TV series that called video messages waves.
Google Wave is meant to replace the way you use email and make you millions of times more productive than you are now. The project is being open sourced by Google because it wants this technology to replace email as we currently know it. Google Wave is cutting edge technology built from the ground up using the latest software technology. It is HTML 5 based, and supports drag and drop into web pages, so that getting images and video into a Wave, is simply a matter of dragging the content you want into the Wave.
Currently the product is still in developer preview phase which means that it is not yet available to use, but Google has said it will be made available later this year.
If you watch the hour and 20 minute long video, hosted on youtube, you will be utterly amazed at some of the technology previewed such as spell checking which understands grammatical context and on the fly translation into a foreign language as you type. In my opinion, Google Wave represents a quantum leap forward in online communications technology. Web sites such as ReadWriteWeb and Information Week are hailing this as the next killer app.
If this technology proves to be the winner it looks to be, products such as Microsoft Outlook could be rewritten to work with Waves rather than traditional email.
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