Google Wave

There is a new wave in Town: The Google Wave. It’s brought to us primarily from the Australian brothers that brought us Google Maps and the Google team. They have decided to make the Wave open source; so developers can create applications to run on the wave and deploy them as they deploy the web application.

A little bit about Wave.
Did I say little? Wave is A LOT!!! In it, we have email, blogging, Google-style twitting, interactive robots and other cool stuff. One of my favorite is the real time effect in the Wave. Just as a wave is considered dynamic and can change due to reactions to external and internal stimuli, the Google Wave emulates this effect seamlessly by having waves update in real time. It is like a superhero application. You may not understand the amount of power this application has so I will do a little break down of the properties I understand. At this moment, as I am blogging this, I am in the middle of the demo video. Well, not technically “the middle”; for my intricate readers, I am approximately 73.935% through with the demo video (find this video at http://tinyurl.com/nal2az).

First off, the concept behind the Wave was to create an futuristic emailing application. This turned out to have more functionality than futuristic can handle. You can send messages to people, dynamically add people to the conversation, reply to posts, reply to parts of a post (different paragraphs individually), use forms, dynamically create a document. Now you see the word “dynamically” appearing twice in the previous sentence. This is because it is as dynamic as a wave gets
— Real Time! The real time aspect of the wave baffles me the most. In the demo — which is called the Google Wave Developer Preview — Lars uses the wave to send a message to Jennifer when she is offline. When she logs in, the wave is highlighted in bold to indicate a “disturbance in the force”. Jennifer replies to the wave as a normal email client will reply to the wave and also replies to a part of Lars’ message. Lars then replies to her message while she’s online and before my eyes, I saw technology unveil. The joy it brought with it was like that of an muslim man seeing the beauty in his wife's face for the first time and being rest-assured he made the right choice. The wave updated in real time as Lars typed; character-by-character.

In the same vein, there is a search function that shows different blogs that match the content in the search bar. This also updates dynamically; in less than a second. If you are in Tokyo and you update a wave to include a word which someone in Port Harcourt is searching for, it shows up in his search results. If you hit the Backspace key before he clicks on your wave, it goes off the search results.

With the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW), the paradigm of the world being reduced to a global village kicked in. But now, I claim this application reduces the world to a global apartment.

Google Wave is currently being developed and will be deployed later this year. You can develop applications for it. Check out http://code.google.com/apis/wave/ to do so.

Some clarification: I am not being payed or getting any revenue from Google by this post. This application is pure genius and I simply appreciate. Did I say simply? Well let me get back to my video.

Cheers.