Google said it intends to release a preview build of a new Web-based communication and collaboration tool by late September. Called Google Wave, the open-source tool will initially be offered to about 100,000 people who have volunteered to provide feedback.
Google Wave — based on the new HTML 5 markup language for building Web pages — is already available to developers via a “sandbox” version of the tool’s enabling APIs, noted product manager Dan Peterson.
“We plan to start extending the Google Wave preview beyond developers on Sept. 30th,” Peterson said. “In addition to the developers already using Wave, we will invite groups of users from the hundreds of thousands who offered to help report bugs.”
Speedier Conversations
According to Google Wave creator Lars Rasmussen, the tool will let individuals communicate and work together on “waves” — collaborative communications containing richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, gadgets and other elements. Each wave is formulated as a “tree structure of messages” within which conventional e-mail and instant-messaging capabilities are combined and delivered in almost real time on a keystroke-by-keystroke basis, which “dramatically speeds up the conversation,” he observed.
“Its concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave,” Rasmussen said. “That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication.”
With Google Wave, any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content, and add participants at any point, Rasmussen said. Moreover, mobile workers will be able to use smartphones to participate in waves without having to worry about intermittent wireless connections because the tool’s playback function “lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when,” Rasmussen said.
The new platform also enables any wave to…