Google launched a public beta test today for Google Wave, a clever, complex tool that lets small teams of people collaborate in real-time without sitting in the same room. Compared to Microsoft’s Office 2010 and Hotmail, which were debuted to the press in the past week, Google Wave cranks up the concept of real-time communications to the point where you can watch your coworkers type onscreen.
Google won’t actively hawk Wave against Microsoft’s workplace establishment of applications, but the free (and ad-free) Wave is meant to be used instead of, not alongside, Microsoft’s communications and collaboration tools.
Wave is hard to describe to people who haven’t used it, because it doesn’t fall into an existing, well-known software category. Wave users are able to have discussions that look sort of like email, except that the conversations updated themselves on the fly, onscreen, as participants type more into them. In parallel, Wave also hosts documents that can be group-edited onscreen. It’s sort of like mixing Twitter, Microsoft Office (or Google Docs, if you’ve used it), and online meeting tools such as WebEx and GoToMeeting.
As an added twist, a software API allows users to hook up automated “robots” to Wave. One such bot, named Tasky, writes Wave users to let them know when tasks in a project plan are met, and when they’ve gone undone.
Unlike most collaboration tools, Wave shows group members’ typing onscreen while they are still typing. The result is a very live feeling of thinking together, rather than trading revisions of a document or replies to an email thread back and forth, in a sort of electronic badminton game.
