Ripple effect
With a deadly Tsunami ripping through the Pacific today, Google seems to have picked a rather ominous date for announcing a huge field test of its much anticipated ‘Google Wave' - the firm's latest and greatest communications and collaboration tool.
But bad omens aside, Google Wave - announced back in May 2009 - while apparently still not quite ready for "prime time", is being rolled out to some 100,000 users on Wednesday, including developers, individual testers who signed up early, and "select" corporate users of Google Apps.
The online desktop represents the crest of Google's efforts to flood the social networking and enterprise space simultaneously, offering a collaborative space for groups of users to swap messages, share and edit documents, drag and drop widgets and even play games like Sudoku. In other words, it has all the potential to be a one-stop-shop for instant messaging, email, document collaboration and social networking.
The software, pegged as probably one of Google's most significant innovation projects, has already been available to a very small, select group of developers for testing purposes, but Google reckons the tide (er, time) is right to let a wider audience dive in and have a go.
Writing in the company blog today, Lars Rasmussen, one of Wave's creator's and an engineering manager at Google's Australian offices, said several of the Wave testers would be allowed to invite friends to try it too and noted Google had "focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability," before unleashing it on the wider testing audience.
However, bugs were still a risk, said Rasmussen, writing that users may still "experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky." So, nothing different to Gmail then, eh?
