Wave.Google.com - The Future of Real Time Communication

Finally, after being unveiled in Google’s I/O conference last May, the long-awaited Google Wave finally is here (well, for 100,000 of us, anyways). Google Wave has been called many things: the future of email (even though it’s not much like email), the future of social networking (though it’s not really that much like the social networks we’re used to), and the future of the internet (which is a very big place, and being called the “future of” something that big will always lead to disappointment).

Don’t get me wrong, the excitement/hype surrounding Wave is well deserved, as it is a game changer in the field of real-time communications. As soon as you log into Wave, you’ll be able to see that it’s meant for you to stay there, all the time, kind of like you do with your mail client (Outlook, gMail, etc.). Its name comes from the conversations you create, waves, which are a combination of email and document, which you can add people to and edit in real-time.

The current preview is fairly polished, it might crash every once in a while, and I haven’t been able to use some of the more promising gadgets, but it’s a matter of time before it gets to its full potential. Gadgets and bots will play a big role in Wave’s future, as they are the gateway for developers to add new functions to the Wave platform. You can tweet from Wave, insert a wave inside your blog posts (for other wave users to interact with), and play games against your Wave buddies. Image sharing is very good, with a simple drag-and-drop mechanism, you can add photos to a wave and share them with your buddies.

Google Wave is here to stay, but I don’t see it being the massive revolution people were touting it to be. With the initial rollout of only 100k users, it’s pretty tough to find someone else you know using Wave, so the majority of users will not get the full potential out of it. Luckily, you can suggest people to get an invite soon, and as the number of users grow, so will Wave’s usability. It’ll be interesting to see where developers take Wave, and how they integrate it with the social internet we’ve all grown to love.

“Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless -- in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

It’s a game-changer, no doubt. The future of Wave lies in third-party developers adding new and interesting functionalities to Wave, and you can’t do better than that.

When will new invites roll out? Will it be an integral part of Chrome OS? When will it be integrated with already existing Google services like gMail and Calendar?