Google Wave

Seeing as I have a lot of time on my hands and limited resources as to the projects I can undertake, I spend a lot of time surfing the internet. I have a blog, a facebook page, a website, but the one thing that I had wanted was a better way to stay in touch with friends and family.

Right before I left home a friend of mine mentioned that he thought it would be an awesome idea to start a blog and give all our friends the password to it so that we could tell each other stories without having to check 50 blogs or deal with app requests in facebook that offer the incredible ability to send all the people you're not really friends with a smiling face. It was a great idea.

The main problem I have with facebook is that it has become so bloated. It's no longer a website for people to stay in touch with friends. It's become a way for people a world away to pester people they've never met. But this, this could be cool. Something streamlined. Most importantly this would be private. We could restrict the people who could add to it.

Back to me having too much time on my hands. I started to develop an idea of what this could look like as a new social networking site. One that doesn't allow apps or any of that other crap. Almost like a private forum. I thought and thought and thought. And just as I was about to contact a friend of mine who is very into venture capitalism...Google unveiled Wave.

This is the next big thing. Mark my words. You heard it here first. This is going to revolutionize not only the way people communicate on the internet, but also the way that businesses are run. There is no limit to the possibilities.

Wave is a real time email/chat/document editor web service. You start a wave (similar to an email) send it to your friends and they can respond by simply clicking reply when they receive it (just like email). If it happens that two people are on at the same time they can chat inside of that wave in real time. You literally see the words as the person types instead of seeing "suchandsuch is typing". You can upload rich text documents (similar to word or excel) and each person that you allow to see the wave can edit the page simultaneously. In the demo that I saw, eight people were editing a business document at the same time. What would take days to get done now only takes as long as you need to type.

Ok, so this sounds cool. Yeah! I can do my email and chat just like gmail, but with a little document editing thrown in. But this is where the kicker comes in. It's open source protocol, which means that you can host it on any server. You don't have to log into google to use it. Any website with a server can host there own private version, allowing those they want to participate to participate and being invisible to people outside of the group.

So I'm a little disappointed that my friends idea and my additions to said idea didn't make us millions, but I can't wait to get my hands on Wave. And you better believe it's coming to thisisthacarter.com