28 May 2009
Search giant Google has unveiled Google Wave, a system aimed at improving online collaboration, and has provided preview versions to developers at the Google I/O Conference taking place in San Francisco.
Google software engineering manager and ex-Google Maps guru Lars Rasmussen pointed to previous communications advances such as email and instant messaging as the starting point for Google Wave - essentially, asking the question: "What would email look like if we developed it today?".
"With Google Wave, we're proposing a new communications model, and after more than two years, we're very eager, and a little nervous, to see what the world might think," he said.
Google hopes Wave will cause a re-think about what a single communications platform might look like when started from scratch, but with access to the online technologies people take for granted today.
Wave will allow multiple users to exchange real-time dialogue, photos, videos, maps, documents and other information forms within a single, shared communications space known as a "wave".
Users of the system should be able to see instantly what fellow collaborators are typing and even publish a wave to a blog or web site, where the content will update instantly as the wave changes. Google said the aim is to allow people to communicate and work together in a richer, more instant and integrated way.
Google Wave will introduce features such as concurrent rich text editing, whereby users will be able to see, "almost instantly, letter-by-letter, what fellow collaborators are typing into a message or document in a wave," according to Rasmussen
There will also be a playback feature, and Google said the technology can integrate with the rest of the web. "Developers can build extensions to Google Wave using our open APIs, embed waves in other sites, or build applications that interoperate with Google Wave, " said Rasmussen.
Google also said it was planning to open source Google Wave in the coming months.
Google Wave - if it lives up to the potential of its public demo at the Google I/O conference in the US last week - represents a step forward in collaboration; a tool with powerful integration features open to entire communities. It's easy to see why the developer audience in San Francisco were so quick to display their enthusiasm for Google's new communications effort. Combining mail and messaging on one platform, allowing the dynamic creation and editing of blogs and documents, the ability to share photo albums and maps, plus a great deal more, Google Wave takes common technologies embraced by web users to the next level of usefulness. Use experience characteristics like the "live" aspect of a wave i.e. real-time transmissions of conversations and content editing mean the adoption potential of Google Wave is immense.
Organisations interested in this development must understand however the cost on the network and its infrastructure components. In a similar way MS SharePoint generates productivity benefits for employees on the front end whilst creating traffic-based strain on the infrastructure, Google Wave has enormous disruptive potential in the network "chattiness" sense. It will intensify the need for infrastructures to employ real application layer intelligence to identify and distinguish between applications, many of which could be encrypted or running across the same protocol, and dynamically applying the relevant acceleration, security or high availability policies to optimise that traffic and protect the infrastructure.
Posted by: Owen Cole, Technical Director, F5 Networks 08 Jun 2009
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