Google Reinvents Email, Docs with ‘Google Wave’
[www.pcmag.com] What would e-mail look like if it were invented today, rather than several years ago? Meet Google Wave, a preview application shown off Thursday at the Google I/O conference.
The Google Wave site is now up and running, although access to the application will be restricted. Google Wave was developed by the Google Maps team, led by Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens.
“One of the best times of my life was in 2005, just after the launch of Google Maps, when developers started doing crazy things with the APIs,” Rasmussen said, adding that he hopes developers will do the same with Wave.
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[latimes.com] Google presented a private demonstration of its much-anticipated collaboration tool, Google Wave, this morning. Even after watching all of the videos and talking to the developers, the
first thing that struck us is how rough it is around the edges.
To be fair, Google calls it a developer preview, meaning it’s not meant for the prying eyes of the average user or critical journalist. Yet, the Times got an invitation anyway.
First, the good news: Wave has a lot going for it. Its function for letting users watch as you type each letter is punchy, just like it was in the demo, and works surprisingly well. At first, it feels sort of strange exposing your own typing habits and witnessing others’. But it really speeds conversations along.
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[arstechnica.com] Google is looking to change the way we use the Internet to communicate with a new service that it calls Google Wave. Wave was previewed Thursday during the Google I/O conference as a way to combine e-mail, chat, photos, feeds from around the Web, and more in a collaborative environment. The project is not only cool-sounding, it’s also quite ambitious, and Google hopes it will eventually replace some of our uses for e-mail.
In a post to the Official Google Blog, Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen discussed the evolution of Wave after he and his brother Jens joined Google. According to Rasmussen, too much of our Internet communication was created out of imitation of a real-life form (e-mail, live chat, document sharing), and as a result, it had become too segmented when it didn’t have to be. “What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?”
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