It is a lesson for us all to know how ahead of time google keeps itself , It has started developing google wave 2 years back and now is the time when it is ready with this amazing communication and collaboration tool named google wave, needless to say it is designed to accommodate todays youths changing communication method where they are now communicating in a group involving more than 2 people , hence the walls, scrapbooks or tweet posts are growing stronger day by day.
The other point to be noted was growing usage of instant messengers which are almost replacing emails, now even if the receiver is offline than also one can IM him which he can open after coming to online so the very first work GW did was to take a hybrid look of IM and email where now there is hardly any difference left . In GW when sender is editing /writing /musing in his email text editor , that is instantly visible WORD BY WORD , now imagine that , this is what is called real time messaging , messages at the speed of your thought ( though I would never like this much realtime ness so google has also given a check box to disable this ). Even more exciting is that attachments also appear realtime on the recipients wave window. The time sender drags and drops attachment , thumbnails will appear at receivers window much before he has downloaded entire lot.
Another cool function is to playback forwarded mails in the sequence in which they were originated and evolved,its so common to forward a mail chain to a new recipient and he has to go through entire chain from bottom to top but now he can just click on playback option and this chain will start appearing from scratch , pretty impressive I would say.This way it is much easier to add a person to the wave and again for people who would like to choose to send a private reply , they can do so privately in wave too. Google calls it a tree structured mailing/messaging where any branch of tree can be taken and expanded only to a limited group ( or to entire public).
This wave will without any doubt collaborate and consolidate all your communication channels. Very soon you will be using waves in your orkut accounts, blogging portals and anywhere else and yet be able to control and monitor all of them from your google wave (email ) editor. So what happens about editing, currently if you share something across so many comunication channels you edit it every where but in wave you just have to edit it once and it will be reflected everywhere . This collaboration is even possible for documents editing and production where same document can be edited (simultaneously!!)by multiple members ( it will include power point , spreadsheets and text based docs).
oh yes it also works on mobiles !
Undoubtedly it is the first and foremost collaborative tool of its kind and competitors of google (like yahoo, MSN and now their marriage..) will find themselves in a shocked state to counter it ,may be copying this formula from google would be easy and at time people do it well ( like facebook copied stuff from orkut and twitter and today is leading the social networking area) but we all know google has the ability to take a quantum leap every time..
