GenealogyMedia Blog

GenealogyMedia.com: The Blog: "Google Wave is a tremendously powerful platform that will change the way genealogy and family history are done. Users of Wave create 'waves,' which are something between conversations, e-mail messages, collaborative authoring sessions, video and picture sharing, blog authoring, and so many more things.

The key technology involved in Wave, though, that makes it better than every other available product for collaborative authoring is that it allows for near real-time communication. If I send you an e-mail, I have to wait for you to read it. If I write a blog entry, and I'm collaborating with another author, I have to save my draft, then tell them to take a look. Even if I'm 'instant messaging,' I still spend a good portion of the time waiting for a response and staring at a message that say something like, 'So-and-so is typing.' But with Google Wave, I can see my correspondant type at the same time that I'm typing. The conversation is not serial, but parallel -- we are both talking at the same time. It's more like an actual conversation. When we work together on a document, we can each make edits wherever in the document we need to, and this can happen simultaneously as fast as we can type."