Google Wave as Reporting Tool

Search engine giant Google last week unveiled a revolutionary open source project that could change how reporters and the public communicate and share information.

Google’s biggest product launch in recent memory has generated lots of buzz. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client.

The open source technology promises to let newsrooms take better advantage of real-time reporting tools that offer the public and editors functionality to work together on breaking news as it happens. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

A combination of conversation and document, a “wave” enables people to communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. These “waves” offer a new experience of real-time collaboration, sharing, conversation and editing between multiple parties.

Essentially a real-time communication platform, Google Wave was the brainchild of a Sydney-based team, brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen who were involved in Google Maps previously. Google Wave was announced at the Google I/O 2009 conference in San Francisco. Watch the demo video below.

In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The Official Google Blog

Google says the product is expected to be available later this year. It is inviting developers to “add all kinds of cool stuff” before its public launch. News organizations can apply to get free access to the Wave developer’s sandbox and technology to start testing and modifying it for their own custom projects.

To make sense of it all, this guide provides an overview of Google Wave, key information, definitions, and links related to the launch.