The Google Tsunami is Coming! Watch out Facebook!

Google has announced that its new real-time communication platform, Google Wave will be launched to the public later this year. This will be Google’s biggest product launch in their recent online history.

google-wave150Google Wave is designed to be a real-time communication platform. It combines email, social networking, instant messaging (IM), wikis, online chats and project management all built into one web application. Google Wave is actually designed to replace email, instant messaging (IM), blogs and wikis. It is also build to be a collaboration tool whereas FaceBook is not build to be a collaboration tool at all, although you could use it as such if you know your way around it. So, in this aspect FaceBook is just a glorified IM platform- to put it bluntly.

Here are some of Google Wave’s features:

  • You can see what someone else is typing in real time.
  • Third party developers can build their own applications within Google Wave, just like in Facebook and iGoogle.
  • Waves (Google Wave posts) can be embedded on other blogs or websites.
  • What ever you write in a Google Wave can be edited by everyone else. This gives also you the opprotunity to correct or append information submitted by other people;  you can also add comments within conversations.
  • The Google Wave code will be open source.
  • Easy Drag-and-drop file sharing. You don’t need attachments; just drop your files into Google Wave and everyone will have access to them.
  • Waves can be playbacked.
  • Spelling autocorrection.
  • Auto-translation on-the-fly.
The big thing is advertising,…of course. Google Wave is trying to provide companies and marketers more targeted advertising opportunities in a similar way to Facebook. When the Google technology sees what you are discussing in your Wave then the advertisements will be presented to you according to the topic. For instance if you are talking about your Yoga practice then after awhile ads about Yoga classes, Yoga mats and Yoga books start appearing on your page. This is actually pretty scary; the big G knows exactly what you are doing and targets commercial messages based on your activities. Advertisers will be loving this no doubt!
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Kris Olin
Web Designer | Internet Promotion Strategist
Msc (marketing)

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