Google Wave is a real-time multifaceted communication and collaboration platform.
It unifies different web technologies such as email, instant messaging, wiki, online documents and social networking.
Google Wave works on the idea of providing a real-time communication and collaboration by integrating established and emerging web technolgies.
Colayer, a Swiss-Indian software company, already provides a platform for companies to communicate, collaborate and co-create by building interactive social Web 2.0 environment
Microsoft, which is trying hard to catch up with Google on the internet, and Yahoo are widely expected to come up with Wave-like offerings. Buying out Colayer may be an option all three might be looking at.
What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Wave terminologies
Wave: A container for enhanced set of threaded conversations that is viewable as a document. It modifies real time and stores historical information.
Wavelet: A threaded conversation spawned within a wave. All participants on a wavelet have read/write access to content within the wavelet.
Blip: A single message that appears in a wavelet.
Participants: Each wave has a set of one or more participants who engage and interact in a wave. Participants are added to a wave by existing participants.
