Google Wave – A Review

After exciting official preview video of Google’s upcoming service Google wave I really wanted to check out Google Wave, which is currently under test and has not been publicly launched by Google.

I knocked my friends asking for any Google wave invitation and finally i got it. I was sort of excited hence I quickly signed up. Like all other services, my Google Account was used to sign up,  meaning that Google Wave fetched all my data from my Google account – so it was smooth process.

However, I found nothing interesting or maybe i was over expecting after watching the exciting  boom boom of Google wave in TV channels, over internet and in magazines. Rather I would say that all that hype is created by those who haven’t used Google Wave yet, otherwise…

Google wave is not an alternative to Facebook, Orkut or any other popular social network. Yes Google wave is next generation social networking thing but fun and helpful for business users, work-groups and for conferences. A very fast funfair place while you can manage your work with others with ease. By sharing documents, messages, videos,web searches and a lot more. Wave has both live and offline messaging facility.

If you ask for features, some of them are as following

Features

• Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.
• Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.
• Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application developers can build their own apps within waves. Such applications can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.
• Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.
• Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.
• Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.
• Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

I am not sure why a General Pakistani user should sign up at Google Wave, but definitely, its demand may arise with time – and people may start rushing towards Google Wave.

Are you interested in Google wave? Sadly I did not get any invitation to share with others. And I came to know that Google wave will not be invitation based like Gmail. Existing Google wave users can nominate their friends to Google and then Google will send them invitations. This nomination process is not launched yet by Google because still there are many bugs in application and features are disabled due to development. However below are some screenshots and video of Google wave which you may want to watch.

A clean, fast loading wave start page

A running welcome wave in my Inbox by Google

Writing a new Wave

Currently available Wave option: While writing a wave you can leave private message too for someone in the Wave which other Wave participants will not be able to see.

Quick and fun to reply a Wave

Reply anywhere not only at the end of the wave, also can edit message any-time. But editing record is saved.

As I said record is saved of editing and messages, you can playback replay of the Wave.

More coming, Wave is still under development, even settings are disabled.

Also watch this long video by Google