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Rasmussen, a member of Google’s technical staff based in Sydney, is the co-founder of Google Wave, described officially as an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. “It is what email would look like if it were invented today,” said Rasmussen, “The difference is that email works electronically just as snail works through the post office: you write a letter, send it to one or more people and they can reply with their own mails if they wish. But, Google Wave, much like a conference call, allows for conversations between more than two people to happen simultaneously.”
Wave is a web-based, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge email, instant messaging and document—maps, images and videos—all housed in one spot. It allows you to drag, drop or post documents, pictures and videos inside the body of your message.
In Google Wave, you can invite people to collaborate in your conversations; similar to Wikipedia, where anyone can edit articles. It allows those who are invited to the message to reply to or edit any part, instead of writing out separate replies.
Google Wave’s strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions provide, for example, spelling, grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, which, according to Rasmussen, includes some Indian languages as well.
“What is more important is that it all takes place inside a web browser. There is no special software to download or plug-in. This means it can be used from any computer or internet-enabled mobile phone,” said Rasmussen. “What we have done is integrated almost every online trend in communication and every advance in software and hardware technology that has been invented since the 1940s,” he added.
However, Rasmussen says the original idea of this hybrid communication tool is from his brother Jens. “Back in 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping-related start up in Sydney, called Where 2 Technologies, founded by Jens and me. Google bought us and we went on to create Google Maps,” said Rasmussen.
But soon they started thinking about what might come next after maps. “As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were designed in the 1960s. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point; I was immediately sold,” said Rasmussen.
The project was code named “Walkabout” and began to find answers to their questions like: Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents? Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
After more than two years of extensive research, development, testing, trials and expanding ideas, Google Wave has already been used by several thousands of people through a “by invitation” process. According to Rasmussen, Google has scaled up the capabilities to offer the service to millions of users within the next few months without having to be invited by someone who is already a Google Wave user.
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