Freshly Brewed: Will Google Wave be the final death nail of e-mail?

Since May of this year, Google Wave has been highly anticipated by the Internet community. It’s Google’s newest project that they are slowly releasing to the public. On September 30th, the beta version of Google Wave was launched and access was given to a select few 100,000 people for testing.

It has been referred to as a game-changer for communication and even the death of e-mail. So how is Google Wave going to back these statements up? With key features that make Google Wave much cleaner, more efficient and just more fun than e-mail. Let’s take a look below.

How is it different from e-mail?

Google Waves are messages between two or more people online. Google claims that the idea of e-mail came more than 40 years ago. So, with the help of the two brothers who invented Google Maps, the Google team sat down and recreated an online messaging tool that is more efficient and also comes with all the bells and whistles of Web 2.0.

Features

1. Real-Time Updates. Updates to Waves will be real-time. Real-time means the days of clicking “send” after you type your message are over. With Google Wave your text will simply appear to all recipients as you type it. So if you and your co-worker have a Wave open at the same time, his or her words appear as they type them. After your co-worker is done typing, there will be no need to click a send button because the message will already be visible to you. (For those of you concerned about your case of chronic impulse typing, real-time updates can be disabled.)

2. Web site and Blog Embedding. Your wave can also function as a dynamic part of your blog or Web site. If you choose, you can embed your Wave onto your blog or Web site so you or all of the people included in the Wave can update your blog or Web site in real-time with ease.

3. Wiki Functionality. You may not know this, but before it became today’s go-to encyclopedia, Wikis were primarily used internally among employees of companies for editing documents. Google Wave is bringing this technology into homes and offices with easy accessibility. Imagine being able to have four co-workers attached to a Wave with the ability to all read a document and make changes as necessary without having to print it out and send it through the office.

Random Fact: Before Facebook went international they used a Wiki-type service to have the social network translated in numerous languages. They put out a request to bilingual users of the English site and asked them to comb through the content and translate it into whatever language they knew other than English. The plan worked and they had their site translated cost-free by users of Facebook.

4. Gadgets within Google Waves. Much like blogs and Web sites today, you will be able to have gadgets functioning within your Wave. One of the gadgets that has been shown off is a translation tool. It works like this: you are talking to someone from Russia and neither one of you are fluent in the other’s native tongue. As you both start the Wave with each other you also enable the translation gadget. As you type to your recipient the gadget takes the message in real-time and translates it for you. This in turn creates a seamless conversation between two people who do not speak the same language.

5. Message rewind. If you are invited to a Wave a week after it was started you will probably have a few questions as far as what chronological order messages were typed. This will not be much of a problem. First off, these messages will probably look something like your Facebook wall today. Someone posts a message, and someone else can leave a comment under that message. If that is not enough for you, you can rewind the message back to the beginning so you can watch what order each addition was added.

How can you get a Google Wave account?

Right now the only way you can get an account is if someone you know has one already and they nominate you to be an early user. If you do not know anyone with an account, then you have to wait for the full release, which is unknown at this time.

Learn more about Google Wave

Short illustration video that briefly describes Google Wave. (2:15)