Google wave, what google claims to be the next generation of email. When google introduced wave in the conference , It looked promising. Loved the concept of integrating chat and mail into 1, using privacy in the single mail. Most importantly google has come forward to give this framework to organization, rather than asking them to route data through the google servers. And also the ability to add small apps to suit to everyone personal needs. This is a welcome addition to the wave as each user can now choose to customize their account to their needs with apps available in repository or can even develop their own using the SDKs provided.
During the launch of wave , google had provided a glimpse of a very early release of the Wave. Even though it was highly unstable , they did manage to provide with the features which can be expected out of the product in the future. Sadly sandbox accounts were only provided to the developers attending the conference. With more bug fixes and polishing google announced the account available to the public, with the google trademark of invite only accounts. Google had been giving out two kinds of account to the public. One being the Developer sandbox which is purely to develop and test apps. Not good to use for communication. Developer account being a request based account and not a invite based account. The other is the preview account which is a invite based account and also a request based account. This version of wave is a being a heavily stripped down version of the actual wave shown during the launch. Although is much stable than the one shown during the launch, Its almost empty to use.
Got the invite for a preview based account a couple of weeks back. The interface is neat and clean as google always does, and google creates the new term “wave” for mails and chats done . The entire interface gets into 3 basic columns. First having the links for navigations and contacts. The second being the actual list of waves created or received. The third the view column, providing the preview of the wave.
Few features of wave were interesting. Like it automatically adds contacts searching from my gmail contact list. Saves time in searching for friends in google wave. Second was the wave itself, the live update feature. Although it a simple implementation. Its nice to see it being implemented on a web apps. The option to turn off live update is not available in the preview account, Sad news for those people who are good in making loads of typo . Make sure u are typing exactly what the other want to see as they are reading as u type it. There is an option as to ping the other user. Not sure how that works as it also has the same effect as sending a wave. The concept of wave is to merge mail and chat into one. So including a ping option seem little weird . The other option i was eager to check out was the ability to reply for any wave in a conversation, but actually it was little hard to keep track of. even though wave updates us of all unread messages in the wave, once the wave goes more than a page, we need to scroll up and down the wave in search of the wave that we have missed. Needs some practice for ppl who are used to the top down reading in the gmail. Almost no apps have been included along with wave , except for ability to embedded youtube videos and google maps. Google maps does provide some option to choose locations. Google wave still lacks the setting option. The setting link still leads to a wave saying its the settings page :D. Overall google has started with a new idea for email and is now in the process of making some user get into it as it did for gmail. Waiting for google to loads up wave with some apps and setting .
ShadowFox 