What Is Google Wave?

Google Wave was probably the most exciting product announcement from Google since Gmail. Take Twitter, Gmail, Instant Messenger, Flickr, and Google Docs. Pour them into a blender; stir in robots and open the whole thing up to developers to the mix and start blending. You might have something like Google Wave.

Google Wave was introduced at the Google I/O developer's conference in 2009 and made big enough headlines to steal Microsoft's thunder from their Bing launch.

A wave is an entire conversation on Google Wave. Think of it like a large back and forth thread with one or more people in a discussion forum or through an email conversation.

A wavelet is a smaller branch of conversation spawned from a large wave. This is like the smaller group of party-goers having a private conversation in the kitchen while everyone else hangs out in the living room. That same group could later rejoin the larger wave.

A blip is the smallest unit of conversation. Think of a blip as a single email or a single instant message.

Google Wave is a communication system, just like email or instant messaging. Only it combines these methods of communicating and adds a few more.

Google Wave allows you to see messages near instantaneously as you type, but it also allows people who aren't logged in to join the conversation later.

Google Wave robots are non-human "participants" in the conversation. Robots perform specific tasks, such as rebroadcasting conversations on Twitter, translating documents, looking up price comparisons, or other automated routines. You can drag robots into and out of waves.

Google Wave was introduced to developers shortly after its launch. In September 2009, Google began rolling out invitations to the "preview" version. This version is not fully functional and may crash or get bogged down by traffic. Preview invitations were offered to developers, volunteer beta testers, and select Google Apps users.

Google Wave is a hosted product. This is similar to the way Blogger and YouTube are offered as services. In addition, Google Wave will be offered as a feature of Google Apps.

Google Wave is also a platform which lets developers create applications that work with and within Google Wave. This is like Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps and other platforms where developers make third-party apps.

Finally, Google Wave is a protocol. Google will let other companies, families, organizations, and individuals run their own wave servers. If they're all using the wave federation protocol, they should all be interoperable.

Think of this like email. You and I probably use different email servers, but we can send each other email messages. That's because our email servers communicate with each other using the same protocol. Like email, wave users will use the same username@domain address system.