The second-day keynote at Google I/O just finished, with one of the coolest demos I've ever seen, Google Wave (more info).

 

Wave is a real-time, visual communication tool created by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, brothers and creators of Google Maps. Wave combines email, instant messaging, real-time collaboration, and data from feeds into waves. A wave is what Google calls a hosted group conversation. In other words, waves are discussions or projects that many people collaborate on, within the same company or group, or across groups.

 

Google Wave Screenshot 

 

[Image from http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html]

 

A user starts a wave and adds others to it. Anyone on the wave can add text, images, or gadgets. Waves also contain a playback mechanism to allow anyone to see how the wave evolved. Waves even allow more than one person to edit the same text at the same time (each user's place is highlighted so everyone can see where other users are editing).

 

Waves have a number of other interesting features, such as integration with blogs, context-aware spell checking, and real-time translation in 20 languages. Wave has APIs and is being open sourced, and all attendees at the I/O conference will receive sandbox accounts for the developer platform.

 

Best of all, Wave will have an Android mobile client, so you can participate in waves right from your Android phone. We might also see more Android clients or extensions for Android mobile phones.

 

 

Suzanne Alexandra

Cohost, MOTODEV Weekly Android Podcasts

 

BTW, here are a few photos from Day 2 so far:


Message Edited by suzannea on 06-02-2009 10:39 AM