Google Wave

So you heard about this new thing from Google called Google Wave. A friend of yours managed to get an invitation and asked if you would be interested. You jumped at the opportunity and said "Oh yes! definitely Yes! Wow! You have Google Wave! However did you manage that? You are like totally awesome dude! " or something on the similar lines. He/she sends you an invitation.

It takes few hours for the invitation to arrive and you check your Gmail account every 5 mins. to check if it's there yet. And then there it is: XXXX has invited you to preview Google Wave. Finally! You eagerly sign in. Now what? You go through the demo video as well but still no clue what to do next?

I know I am not the only one with no clue. And I also know that some of you out there must be scratching your head that what I am talking about? So, for sake of those who have no idea what I am talking about, let me take a step back and explain what the hell Google Wave is.

Google Wave is the latest application from, well you know this one, Google. The idea behind it was to have a common place or platform for all the different communication tools available on internet. That includes the emails, IMs, SNS as Facebook and Orkut, Twitter and blogging services as blogspot and wordpress. Sounds cool? Well it does to me. Instead of having 5  different tabs open, I can use only one platform to check, send, post and update all of my communication sites. And that explains my excitement about getting the Google Wave. But a fair warning:  Google Wave is a beta version application at the moment and you can only get access to one if you are invited by a friend. And since it is a beta version application, there are not a lot of gadgets or robots available for the application. Oh yes, you heard me right: gadgets and robots.

That’s how the Google Wave works. So the Google Wave has the concept of waving (you can think of new wave as a new message). You can wave at anyone in your contact list. So the Google Wave Robots (or bots for short) have their own email addresses as tweety-wave@appspot.com for twitters. You simply add them to your contact list and start a new wave with them. They will send you the instructions through the wave for how to use these applications through Google Wave. For example, the first time you start a new wave with twitter robot (tweety-wave@appspot.com) you would need to login to your twitter id and once you do that you can see your twitters as a Google Wave. You can read the twitters, update your status and reply to other people’s twitter.

Gadgets, on the other hand are URLs that can be added using the green icon on a New Wave screen.

Well that’s all I know about Google Wave, anyways. As I said it’s a beta version software and is still very new so there aren’t a lot gadgets or bots for it at the moment. However, as Google is planning the Google Wave to be open source, I expect we will see a lot of Google Wave in future. Just as an example, consider this bot:

TwilioBot (twiliobot@appspot.com) automatically transforms the phone numbers in the wave into click-to-call links. If user clicks a link, a call is placed to his cell phone or landline and to the phone number in the link and the two are connected. The phone call can be transcribed and automatically inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio of the conversation.

Scary, isn’t it? Well I still like the basic concept behind the Google Wave and I am, for one, looking forward for it to become fully functional!

P.S.: For those of you, who have a Google wave and want to try new gadgets and bots, check out these two sites:  http://wavety.com/ and http://techpp.com. Happy Waving :)