The recently announced Buzz social network from Google has grabbed a few headlines and got many people talking about its similarities and differences to other social networks and services, such as Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.
But Google released another new product not that long ago and it was called Wave. As stated on Waves’ homepage; “Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation
and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”
So it seems Google is jumping head first into the fray of communication and collaboration tools. Now, I have been using Buzz for a few days and I have to say so far I am impressed. I’ve spoken to absolutely no one that I know and I have some great conversations with some complete strangers, its definately opened up my world from the closed one that Facebook creates.
Wave on the other hand is a bit different. Wave is more of a business and work tool than a social tool. It incorporates instant chat (Google talk), e-mail (Gmail) and document sharing. You can write a document in real-time (i.e. text appears as you type allowing much faster conversations) and other Wavers can be added to the Wave to create a fluid document contributed to by many individuals. A Wave is designed to be part document and part conversation, users are able to work together remotely much more efficiently.Participants can be added at any point during a Wave and the Wave can be edited and replied to by any participant. There is also a nifty “Playback” feature which lets any newly added participants rewind the Wave and watch how it played out.
The Wave can contain rich content such as Photos, Videos, formatted text, links and Google maps. It really is a very useful tool.
My primary uses for Wave will be group projects for when i’m at university, brainstorming for when i’m designing websites and keeping notes on meetings and the like. It’s pretty useful that your Wave is stored online, so you can access it from any computer, anywhere. Its not like a Word document where you would have to transport the document with you wherever you went!
Wave has not taken off quite how Google may have anticipated, it’s been described a lot as a failed project. I think Wave has the potential to be something great, but not that many people are aware of it. It needs to be plugged to students more as it would be an invaluable tool for contributing to group work, especially if its not always easy for everybody to get together at once. Anybody who might not be able to contribute would just be able to Playback the Wave when they had time.
Since i’ve been using Buzz there have been a lot of mentions of Buzz and Wave being integrated, this is something I would love to see and something I believe could re-ignite interest in Wave. It would be a great thing to start an impromptu chat in Buzz and then be able to export that chat to a Wave.
This seems like something a lot of people would like to see, so lets hope Google listen up and give them what they want!
Tags: Wave