What is Google Wave?

I'm sure many of you have already heard of google wave as it was announced at the Google I/O conference May 27, 2009 and you probably wonder what it exactly is. Google Wave is not just one thing, but it is several features merged into one and I will try to sumon the most important features in this article and also give you an overview of how it works.

Google Wave is a service from Google that combines e-mail, instant messaging, wikis and social networks. The tool can be used for communication and real-time collaboration over the Internet. In one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. In Google Wave it's possible to incorporate services from other providers.

 

How does Google Wave work then?

Google Wave, which according to Google is to replace e-mail, works in such way that it starts a so-called wave, where you communicated directly with the one's who choose to communicate with. It begins with choosing who you want to communicate with and then you write a message. If the persons that you chose are online, they will see the message immediately when you write it, without having to wait for you to have finish writing and send it. Since the wave is stored as a document on one of Google's servers, you can add users even later on to the wave, and they then have access to all the original discussions, they can so called "rewind the wave". The people you chose to communicate with, can respond directly to "the wave" or modify the text and everything can be seen directly on the screens of the others participating, without the others having to wait for the person to bee done editing or finish writing the message.

You can also attach files and in order to do that, you can drag the files you want to share directly into the "wave", for example from your desk or any folder on your computer and files are displayed directly on the screens of the others. The most interesting feature is that if the person you are communicating with is speaking another language, you can select the text to be translated into the person's own language directly as you write. For example you are writing in Spanish "My name is John" , it will be translated directly and will be displayed like this "Me llamo John" on the other person's display.

This was a short article on what google wave is and how it works. There are several more articles which describes different features even deeper. You can also check the video tutorials which can be reached under the menu "What is Google Wave?" .

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