What’s hot on Twitter right now – Google Wave
by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg on 09/11/09 at 1:03 pm
No comments
Google Wave is a trendy topic that’s on everyone’s lips on Twitter. Everyone’s trying to get hold of invitations and some are still asking what it is. Well, Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009.
Wow, now that’s a mouth full, but what does that mean? Let’s break it down: It’s an online tool for real-time communication. A wave can be a conversation as well as a document where people have discussions and work together. This sounds like a merging of e-mail, instant messaging and social networking – well, that’s exactly what it is. People can work together on Google Wave using richly formatted texts, photos, videos, maps and lots more. Google Wave has been released as a preview to 100,000 people (mostly developers) of whom could invite twenty users each to experience it.
Some of you might still ask: “So what?” Ryan Carson wrote a post on Six Ways that Google Wave is Going to Change Your Business, Career and Life which I found very useful. Here are only a few of his reasons:
- Google is making it easy to augment the power of Wave by writing Wave Extensions. These are similar to Firefox Add-ons and they fall into two areas: Robots and Gadgets which Ryan discusses in detail.
- Google has created a huge API to Wave, but one of the really great things is the ability to embed a Wave into any web page. Ryan explains this in terms of blogging.” You can create a Wave and then publish it to your blog.”
- The separation between documents and emails will be completely removed with Waves. This is because Waves can be edited by more than one person. An example would be taking notes for a meeting. Ryan explains how this would work.
- Wave is written entirely in Google Web Toolkit. GWT allows you to write HTML 5 web apps in Java, which are then cross-compiled into optimized JavaScript.
On Twitter, people are still asking for invitations or offering to hand them out. But that’s not all that’s being talked about the Wave on Twitter. Here are a few quotes from Twitter with links to some great posts.
- @DominikBernauer: Google Wave vs Twitter at conferences http://bit.ly/2KtRKG
- @LKWave: Google moving to Wave-like interface across all its Apps?: Having said that, the pics demonstrate.. http://bit.ly/2DejBh #Google #Wave
- @LKWave: Introducing Google Wave – All you want to know about THE NEW WAVE: Google Wave is an online tool .. http://bit.ly/1CEE8n #Google #Wave
- @lorenv: Google wave make no sense to you? Here you go http://bit.ly/39F1FJ
- @mashable: Google Wave: Better than Twitter for Conference Chatter? – http://bit.ly/2iZrFT
- @phaoloo: 5 Google Wave #Gadgets That You Will Most Likely Use http://bit.ly/3Z9gaz
If you still don’t get Google Wave, watch this hour long video of the Google I/O conference explaining what Google Wave is. It’s long but you’ll definitely get it after watching it!
Yolandi Janse van Rensburg writes about social media, marketing, life and, of course, cars. We say “of course” because Yolandi is nuts about anything on 4 wheels and runs Autofemme, a blog about cars. Our Ideate sub-editor is also the Heavy Chef girl at World Wide Creative. You can follow her on Twitter @Yolandi_JvR View more articles by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg.
