Nitish Kumar Says: Google Wave: Finally I am introduced with it

Google wave; the all big buzz and I was failing to reach it as I was lazy enough in the start, when it was first declared long back. Yes as per wiki, Google wave was first declared really long back in the Google I/O conference on May 28, 2009.

I went after it, only when my brother Dewashish asked me for an invite to Google Wave. I tried to know the definition and my search ended over the wiki

“ It’s a communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a "preview release" of Google Wave was extended to nearly 1 million users beginning September 30, 2009, with the initial 100,000 users each allowed to invite from twenty to thirty additional users. ”

I tried to digg little bit more deeper and got one more line “Google Wave is designed as a new Internet communications platform. It is written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. (Same GWT behind new interface of Orkut).”

Ok! I am leaving all these lines from external sources and coming up from my own. For me, its something like Google’s implementation of Wiki. As Google says, its a hosted XML Document: the wave, which could be edited by any of the person involved in the conversation.

I would like to present my first Google Wave conversation with the person, from whom I got the invite. May be you all get some idea of my learning about this in raw….

Sachin: Hey, Nitish, So You got the invitation!

Let me know your experience.

Me: Yes I got it and trying to know exactly what this is?

The experience is nice till now and as much I got to know then its not an email tool, but could be said as Google's implementation of Wiki. If you understand that what wiki is then you could understand that what Google wave is and what Google is trying to achieve with it.

Sachin: This is new email tool, cannot understand yet, once we get more and more people involved may be we will get to know the utilization. There are lots of things, We can use lots of social networking things. but definitely start ….

Me: hold it for a second, I want to object. Although Google's definition says that it has something to do with Social Networking, I will strongly object. Its not another Orkut or facebook or MySpace. Its more like Wiki. Your conversations are an Open XML shared Document, which anyone involved could edit and the editing would be completely logged and visibly real time.

Wiki was a Document which anyone could edit, it was a concept which was earlier much opposed that such an information would not be reliable as anyone could edit in wrong ways, but later on over years, as Wiki got success it was proved that if one could edit it for wrong then more people could edit it for right ways as well and so Wiki worked and worked in such a tremendous ways that now they are kind of most reliable source of information for everyone.

I guess Google wave is something like that. A fully rich document (pictures, links, ppts, videos and all type of rich media you know), in which Google is making full use of Google Docs and its strength of real time communication. Now people join in .. have their documents online and these documents will be shared over the users participating the conversation and such document will move online to become some dynamic source of information

People knowing Team Softwares and Wiki will get a true idea about what Google wave.

Sachin: I am looking for more like corporate communication through google wave. What do you think?

Me: Yeah ... you are heading in exactly right direction... first use will be sure Corporate communication, and specially software developers or project handlers as corporate is already using some of such things, and could relate this faster than others.

Main target is to create collaborative documents, which will hold dynamically changing information from more than one sources, which will be edited to suit with the facts more and more and will come up with an ultimate information source.

I would recommend all of you to go through the tech crunch article for the details. Wonderfully detailed article about Google wave.

I also came to know about a few books over the same topic Google Wave and the leading one, which is online for free is http://completewaveguide.com/

I gone through a few of the pages and found them short enough to keep the interest and info. Take a look.

The other books, which I am aggressively looking for, are books from O’reilly publication with the title Google Wave: Up and Running and Getting Started with Google Wave. Although till now, no luck in finding a free copy of the same.

I managed to find somehow a PDF calling itself as Google Wave for Dummies. I guess, its the same arranged PDF version of the Completewaveguide. Could take a look over the PDF Book for the best info available for my side.

updates: 6th December 2009

After many days of receiving invite, now from 2:38 PM of today, I also got the power to invite 8 more and I have started using the same. :)