I just saw just the video demonstration of Google Wave. I am very impressed. It combines many different web 2.0 collaboration and mashup concepts in an amazing way. Here is the list of derivative concepts that I caught:
- SMTP (email - asynchronous communications)
- XMPP (instant messaging - synchronous communications)
- Realtime Document Editing (wiki, Google Docs)
- Federated Communications (SMTP and XMPP both do this)
- Third Party Plugins (many applications do this, but Firefox does it the best)
- Workgroup Security (available many places, but the user interface reminds of Facebook in many ways)
- Document Rollback and History (SVN and Wiki)
Many of the plugins mimic functions I already get (albeit not as elegantly integrated) with Firefox and its extensions:
- Auto-spell checking (integrated)
- Link Suggestions (Zemanta)
- Translation (gTranslate)
- General integration of web objects into messages. (Ubiquity)
This is not to downplay what the Google Wave people have done at all. They have taken all of the concepts and integrated them far more seamlessly than any other application mechanism out there. They have much to be proud of.
The lingering question in my mind how does it handle the integration third party files. For example, not everything is suited to a text document. The obvious example, not touched upon was spreadsheets. While I would guess they have integrations with Google Docs coming, even Google Docs is not a substitute for Excel or even OpenOffice calc. Another application that I use frequently is Freemind, for mind mapping /outlining purposes. It will be interesting to see how these applications, and others, get integrated moving forward.
Many kudos, I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
