Google rolls out preview of Wave
Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News
Issue date: 9/30/09 Section: News
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Google Wave, which combines elements of e-mail, instant messaging and social networking to allow groups of people to collaborate on a task in real time, will be previewed starting Wednesday to more than 100,000 developers and users who have signed up to try Wave and give Google feedback on how well it works.
Developed by a small engineering team led by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers who engineered Google Maps, the idea behind Wave is to move toward a kind of universal in-box - where e-mail, video, maps, photos, text messages and even voice conversations can all become data objects to be shared and manipulated in real time by a group connected to a wave.
Wave is a platform, which is a series of services, on top of which developers can create applications that supplement it. Google has been working hard to engage outside software developers to write applications that will run on Wave, creating services that will lure users and provide a potential source of revenue.
Executives pumped up expectations when Google first revealed Wave at its annual developer conference in the spring, using words like "magical" and "unbelievable" to describe the impact they said Wave could have on Internet communication.
Developers such as Ribbit, a Mountain View, Calif., startup bought last year by BT that bills itself as "Silicon Valley's First Phone Company," already have written applications for Wave that Google featured on its official blog Tuesday.
"If you have an e-mail and an instant message and a voice call, that can all be navigated in the same wave," Ted Griggs, Ribbit's CEO, said in an interview. "It's no longer e-mail is one container - and SMS (text messaging) is one container - and all these things are silos. Wave is breaking those silos down."
Wave users running Ribbit's applications could, for example, hold a telephone conference that would connect through any kind of voice communication - a cell phone, a land line or voice-over-Internet - and then store a recording of the resulting conversation as an audio file or transcribe the conversation into a text document embedded in the Wave.
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