Google Wave - Spelly, Linky, Rosey, and More Magic

Watermole, an early member of the CSLA 2.0 Team (Summer 2007), actively updates her blog with news of cool new tools. I regularly follow 2.0 Team blogs, so her blog alerted me to a developer preview or pre-launch introduction of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference, May 28, 2009. The video is about an hour and a half, but well worth watching. See below.

Highlights: Google Wave, an open source personal communication and collaboration tool.

• Developers are two brothers who designed Google Maps several years ago. Lars and Jens Rasmussen, as well as project manager Stephanie Hannon preview the amazing product, platform, and protocol.
• The open source software product will launch later this year.
• Features include a slick spell-checker (Spelly), ability to detect and add links as you write (Linky), language translator that translate as you write (Rosey), and much more.
• A "playback" feature allows you or a new person that is added to a discussion to start back at the beginning of an edited discussion or collaborative document.
• "Click and drag" attachments and people to add to a document or discussion.
• Wave extensions extend the functionality. Examples of external APIs include a fun "yes/no/maybe" gadget for a group to use to make decisions, games like collaborative chess and sudoku games -- "playback" feature can be used here, too!
• Wave can be integrated with existing applications like Twitter.
• Issue tracker (Buggy) can be used to track and correct software bugs. [This sounds useful for regulatory and public affairs issue managers.]
• ALL THIS IS WHAT IS POSSIBLE IN THE BROWSER.
  

NOTE: Here is what Lerdof (Lars) Rasmussen said regarding using open source software in education in an interview with Builder Australia a few years ago: "It makes no sense to base an educational system on property software. All you are doing is generating new customers for a company as opposed to creating the people that might be the next Microsoft. For example if you have a database course, use an open source database and show them how the database works. Not everyone is going to dig into the guts of this thing, but there will be two or three kids in every class that will, and from what they will learn they can build the next great database. It's crazy when educational systems don't go with open source and go all Microsoft. That is where governments really should be pushing universities."