Phil's blog

Google, at its Google I/O conference, has just announced a new collaboration tool called Google Wave that combines email with instant messaging… now when I first heard that, I wondered how that worked?

Turns out, they’ve come at the collaboration/email problem from the perspective of “if email was invented today, how would it look?”. Existing email works on the same principle of postal mail, a letter is sent out to one or more people. What they’ve done, is create an object (wave) thats centrally hosted on the web and added users to it. These users can then read, edit, comment and have discussions about this object online. There is only ever one wave, one version.

With email, you would reply (all) with your comments, or updates etc. With a wave, you just make your comments at the bottom of the wave like facebook…. PLUS you can do inline comments. select a part of the text that you want to comment on, and your comment will be inserted within the document.

A very cool thing about this is that if the users that are added to the wave are online, you can see them typing and making edits to the wave in real time. This makes conversations quicker because instead of sitting there looking at a “user is typing…” message like in normal IM clients, you can see the text being typed character by character. This means you can get the gist of the message before its completed, so you can formulate your reply instantly. You can of course turn this feature off, if you’re not sure about what you’re typing.

You can even embed waves into websites. Say you have a wave that contains a set of pictures, you can embed that onto your blog, and people’s comments will be reflected in all the places that the wave is being viewed from (clients, blogs, mobile devices).

I probably haven’t explained this very well, so watch the video and all will be explained. I’ve signed up for it already, so hopefully I’ll be able to play with it soon.