Not just a Wave, but a Tsumani!!!!!
So, here I am watching a YouTube video of what someone said was the next generation of Google. The more I watch it, the more I realize that I am having to actively remember to close my mouth so my tongue won’t dry out. I’m just astonished and excited about what the future holds.
Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird all look completely archaic now. Like moving from command line green screen to OS/X!
Here, go gawk at this video!
They’ve mashed up mail, instant messaging, blogging, twitter and team collaboration AND made it extensible with the Google Web Toolkit!!
Here’s the not so elegantly written synopsis:
- Uses HTML 5 in a browser to create an application like environment
- Think Gmail with Instant Messaging built in to each e-mail
- If you add subsequent people to the e-mail chain, they can see not only what is in the e-mail, but they also have the ability to replay the timeline so they can see the order in which replies or content was added
- You can make private in-line comments to a subset of the e-mail chain recipients.
- This pretty much constitutes a collaborative teamroom
- You can instantly post the e-mail chain to a blog just by adding the “blog” robot
BUT WAIT!!! THERE’S MORE!!!!
- You can post pictures and re-name them on the fly and the recipients can see the additions and correction in real-time
- Concurrent editing!!! This one makes it a real-time collaborative team room. All the recipients of the e-mail (the “wave”) can post new content or edit existing content and everyone can see each others input in real-time!
- You can post other “waves” within a wave
BUT WAIT!!! THERE’S MORE!!!!
- All of this is completely extendible using the Google Web Toolkit!!
- Send someone a chess gadget, and you can both play chess in real-time. You can even replay the game to see how you got there!!!
- Any gadget can be embedded, including Google Maps, and you can annotate the maps and the annotations stay within the wave
- It’s integrated with Twitter
BUT WAIT!!! THERE’S MORE!!!
- Using a translation gadget called Rosy, you can type english in a wave, and a recipient can have it translated into their native language. So, if I type in English and I tell Rosy to translate to French, it shows up in the recipients wave as French
Whew…. Wow…
The downsides are how to use it when you are not connected. There are still many parts of the US and the rest of the world that don’t have WiFi access like the lake. Guess I’ll need that Sprint broadband USB adapter when I want to use it away from my wifi network.
And what about moving all e-mail to this new environment? I can get to all the e-mails I’ve had since roughly 2003, including attachments.
I’ve seen the future!
You can find out more at http://wave.google.com