the kdmcinfo weblog

Google demo'ed Google Wave today.  I was in the audience as Google presented the answer to the question: "What would email look like if a creative team of visionaries and brilliant engineers backed by a multi-billion dollar company were chartered with inventing the future of email?" Google Wave is an entire new protocol  (like IMAP or POP) for email. Here are some basics:

• Open source.
• Standards based.
• Web based.
• Extensible.

Of course all of those items fit just about anything that Google produces. 

Google Wave is a new way to think about mail. Wave takes mail beyond text and attachments. Wave is a complete communication platform. Wave takes threaded email and

• Mail (of course)
• Realtime multi-user concurrent collaboration 
• Embed Video, maps...anything.
• Embed Gadgets...you can add functionality to email.
• Realtime chat...with no waiting...(*as* each person types the letters appear on other chat participants screens)
• Publish to a blog automatically with a cool Wave technology called Robots (how Google is *that*)

Here are just a few of the impressive elements of Wave demo'ed today:

• Realtime translation... type in French...read it in English (or any of 42 supported languages).
• Polling... zero code polling with realtime results.
• Granular privacy control of every element of a Wave.