Tuesday Tech Talk #22

Hello folks and welcome to another edition of Triple T. Today will be a little different then our usual format as I want to devote my initial thoughts on Google Wave.

So what is Google Wave you might be asking, you see it trending in Twitter all the time but your wondering, “what is the deal-e-o with it?“. To put it simply it’s what email should have evolved into. Email is about 45 years old give or take a year and for the most part has remained unchanged in it’s being. When you send a message it creates a copy on your computer and sends a copy to the person you send it to. Well that person reads it and replies back now we have 4 copies on each computer but then you want to ask Bob what he thinks of the idea exchanged between Tom and Jerry so far so Tom forwards a copy to Bob and now Tom and Jerry are looking at multiple emails on the same subject.
        What Google Wave does is put everything in the cloud in one message that is a ”live message”. At anytime Tom and Jerry can add Bob into the message and Bob can playback the origin of the wave to get an idea of how the idea for a widget has unfolded. He can then add his boss Susan to the wave and Susan can add her input on the widget but she wants accounting to look into cost for the widget so she adds Sandy to the wave so Sandy can review and get an idea on cost.
        Basically it’s a collaboration tool. Think of it as a white board without space limitation. You can add in images, YouTube videos, and links. Also you can write a message in it similar to word processing tools with formatting, spell check, etc. As far as I can tell there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many people you can add to a wave providing they are a Google Wave user (by invite only at the moment).
        The downside of a wave is if things get too crazy and a lot of input is added a new person gets confused with all that is in there, but there is a playback button which plays back the wave showing how it started from the beginning. Think of it as a DVR for a document. The huge upside is obviously it makes it a lot easier to manage a project online between people without having “dead email” taking up space in the inbox. I am looking forward to seeing how Google evolves Google Wave with new things that could be added.
        So those are my initial thoughts, if anyone wants to drive it around and kick the tires I do have 7 invites as of this writing so comment with an email address and I will nominate you for an invite. Back next week with our usual format of Triple T.