Thread: Google's Wave: online Apps in one tool

GOOGLE has released to developers an early version of a complex collaboration and communications tool that consolidates features of e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, and multimedia management, as well as document sharing.

Called Wave, the Web application is the equivalent of a Swiss army knife for consumer online services and is possibly one of the riskiest and most ambitious endeavors Google has embarked on.

At its core, Wave lets people create a document to which multiple users can add rich text, multimedia, gadget applications, and feeds, and do so concurrently, much as people interact on, say, instant messaging. Users can roll back these "waves" to view the evolution of the document.

In the works for about two years, Wave could draw people away from the company's other products (Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Picasa, and Sites), and from similar products by competitors such as AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Wave could also fall flat if people don't understand its use, or if they can't be con-
vinced to give up e-mail, blogging, IM, and other individual online services. Still, it is a bold attempt by Google to provide a unified Web application for communication and content creation needs, instead of integrating the company's discrete online services.

We're banking on Wave having a very large impact, but a lot of it depends on our ability to explain this to users. That's'part ofthe reason why we're putting this out early to developers," Lars Rasmussen, Wave project cofounder, says.

Even after working on the product for about two years, Rasmussen and the other members of the Wave development team are still discovering new uses for the tool, so he is very aware that grasping the possibilities of Wave will not be an automatic thing for end users.

Explaining further, he adds, "Now is a good time for developers to start picking up the APls, building cool applications and extensions, so when we do launch later this year, our users and their users can enjoy all these things together."

Rasmussen and his brother Jens, the other Wave project cofounder, arrived at Google in 2004 when the company bought their mapping startup Where 2 Tech; they created what would become Google Maps, a service credited with igniting the mashup frenzy.