Video: Google Wave public beta rolling out in September

It's hard to tell if Wave -- Google's new collaborative, universal messaging platform -- is revolutionary or simply, well, neat. It's like a telephone, great when everyone else has one but not so useful if you're the only one. At least that's how it seems after watching the near-universally acclaimed demo presented at Google I/O back in May. Starting September 30th, Google will open up the beta to 100,000 of its closest friends. Just hit the appropriate read link below to register for an invite or click through to watch the 1 hour and 20 minute demonstration. Go ahead, work can wait, innovation can't.

[Via PC Mag]

Read -- Sign up for Wave
Read -- September 30 beta

[Dallasm Posted Jul 22nd 2009 11:59AM]

You B&#^$%, I hate you.

Could you send me a friendly invite if you get the chance?

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 22nd 2009 12:32PM]

I'm exploring it right now. Doesn't seem to have anywhere to send invites, sorry :(

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 22nd 2009 1:07PM]

Really?!?! Damn, all I got was a "Two can eat for $9.99" at Carino's Italian Restaurant!

[xirsteon Posted Jul 22nd 2009 12:01PM]

I'll take one. I've been meaning to get a life.

[TheSmartOne Posted Jul 22nd 2009 1:14PM]

What I reallly want to be able to do, is to import everything from my Gmail account into the new Wave Account - AIM chat included.

[MLamont Posted Jul 22nd 2009 1:32PM]

Wave has regular old email functions and its IM is a good as having IM now with everyone on something different.

I see Wave being more useful to people that already collaborate on documents and projects. The network affect will be stronger for this type of relationship. Much more so than me trying to get all my friends to break the phone contract so that I can call them without eating my mobile minutes.

[stefan Posted Jul 22nd 2009 1:47PM]

I'm not sure you've really gotten what Wave is (and noone knows what it'll become, just see what happened to twitter, which is heavily restricted, while Wave will be completely open and extendible). There's NO difference between an IM and a document in Wave. You can't really say "you can collaborate on documents and send instant or non-instant messages to each other", because that's not how it's built. It's all just... waves. You just start a wave and have others participate in it. Or not, you could use it just for publishing content on the web or as a productivity tool (todo-lists, calendars, note-taking etc).

And really, the extendibility of Wave will most likely prove to be really important in the end. But for starters, I think there will be quite enough for us interested in it :)

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 22nd 2009 3:44PM]

I think businesses are how this is going to get picked up. It's obvious that most people don't get what Wave is potentially for yet. It's not just chat, it's not just anything.

For a design firm (we'll say web design), the design department, programmers, the project manager, and the client are involved in a wave. You don't have to include everything to everybody, so the programmers don't need to see design-only stuff, and the client doesn't get to see initial designs before they're ready to be shown. Here's a run-on sentence of what might transpire: Talking first about what the client wants, and then sharing what they come up with to each other, maybe the design lead pushes for a direction, then all the designers showing a first set of designs, the project manager taking out a couple of the designs because they would cost too much to do, and then sending another part of the wave on to the client, the client likes one of the designs but wants these colors and maybe this part doesn't make sense for this reason, this gets send back by the project manager to the designers, who then tweak the design and comment, and send their final design over, the design gets approved, then the designer whose design got picked and another one work on making the rest of the graphics for the design, adding their finished graphics to the wave as they complete them, while at the same time, the programmers are taking the finished images and incorporating them into their work while still using Wave tech, the project manager asks for a change in one of the graphics, the designer changes it, the programmer doesn't have to do anything because they linked to a Waved graphic, the designers have control of the design the whole way, and can comment to the programmer that this other graphic is actually meant to be used this other way, there, perfect. Then the project manager submits the project. Next year, the client wants another similar thing to be done, and so the first thing the project manager does is scrub through the previous wave to remember if there were specific issues they got into.

For a friend group, integrated chat, mail, photo galleries, showing video clips, whatever.

Every office in the world will want this. I'd bet a lot of blogs and news sites and whatnot incorporate Wave, but I'd bet that offices, non-profits, friend groups, and collaborative projects of all sorts are going to push this. Somebody mentioned Zenbe, and it is similar stuff, but even they are going to incorporate Wave once it gets finalized. This is much bigger than people are understanding.

The other main thing I see is that once you are logged into any Wave server, you are logged into every other site using Wave. Ever not made a comment on a site, because you would have to register, get an email confirming your account, log in, and, hmm, what was I going to say about this? With Wave you get to use the internet more like in a sci-fi story like William Gibson's Neuromancer, where the online world is this big, cohesive whole, instead of tiny chunks everywhere that have nothing to do with each other. You might have to get approved to be on a wave about porn, or about someone's business, but something that is more public, you'd just be able to contribute to, just like if you see an amazing car going by and the person next to you says something about it, you can respond to them without having to log in.

Also, think if Engadget had Wave incorporated into their site. Instead of right now realizing that I had typed out quite a bit and should maybe be blogging it instead, I'd just post it right here and know that my blog could instantly incorporate it, and maybe on the blog version, I'd quote the descriptive paragraph and video link above, so you could tell what I was writing about.

[unfunk Posted Jul 22nd 2009 1:32PM]

I spy with my little eye, something that begins with possiblechromeosscreenshot!

That screenshot up there looks markedly different to any version of Chrome I've seen (although I admit to only seeing XP and NT6 versions) - it's lacking a "Google" branding, and what's with that dashed horizontal line in the title bar?

[A7 Posted Jul 22nd 2009 2:11PM]

these myriad ways of sending inane chatter are getting out of hand.. 'Sunday BBQ Yay....' how about GFY. Gimme text messaging like the good ole days, and no predictive text either...we did it all with sweat n elbow grease

[Xepol Posted Jul 22nd 2009 4:23PM]

Open source you say - truely revolutionary for a client side web app.

It isn't open source because Google wants it to be, or because they need help, but rather because client side HTML *IS* open source by nature.

What other company goes to so much effort to convince you they aren't evil? Would you trust someone who kept telling you they weren't evil?

[mitchsw Posted Jul 22nd 2009 10:13PM]

Reading the source =/= Open source.

Its a legality thing..

[Alex Wright Posted Jul 23rd 2009 10:11AM]

Apart from the fact that Mitch has a very good point. Beign able to read the source doesn't make it open...

You there there's no server side code making this work. You think you can IM and collaborate on an XML stream with PURE HTML and JS?

[blinddance Posted Jul 22nd 2009 4:26PM]

I smell revolution. Just watched the full demo and Google really nailed it here. Many people says it's just a collaboration of many existing methods of communication. The thing here is that it is very well done. Sure it could be a small problem that many people needs to get an account in order to make this useful but I see a future where Waves is the main communication tool out there. Universally. And when that happens, this will revolutionize the way we look at online communication.

A problem could be how different this is to our usual approach to communicating. The Google team themselves said that it was difficult to adopt and fully understand the dynamics and possibilities of working with waves. Myself, being 19 years old was, altho very excited to try out this product, feeling that this will take a long time to master. Maybe it will take a generation to get used to this new way of communication.

I'm impressed tho. This is the biggest innovation since... Email, or ICQ, in my opinion.

[dan325013 Posted Jul 22nd 2009 6:12PM]

I wonder if they'll make it require Google Chrome and if they'll try and make it run on strictly Chrome to get more people on the Chrome platform for when Chrome OS comes, or if they'll just require standard browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 22nd 2009 6:23PM]

They show it working on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox in the video. It probably works in Opera too. Now about IE...

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 22nd 2009 8:02PM]

Interested in a wave-like experience that's available now? Check out Shareflow at getshareflow.com

[l3it3r Posted Jul 24th 2009 4:22PM]

I'm also in the Sandbox, VERY cool tech, can't wait to see where it goes. Just wish more people I knew had access :(

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 27th 2009 11:29AM]

A discussion forum for Google Wave that I have joined is http://googlewavecommunity.com/forum ...I found there that Google Wave is not one of its kind. There are others too ( Ref : http://googlewavecommunity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=25 ). Do you feel all these wave & wave like products can be made intercommunicative. By d way, in Google Docs we already had a real time collaborative platform. But that's just a part of the wave.