Google Wave. What’s In It ?

Aren’t you the one of 100,000 lucky users who got an invitation to Google Wave, hmm then nothing to worry you can get a preview of it right here in my blog..

Google’s real-time communication and collaboration service, which entered its public preview last month, has a fascinating motivating concept behind it: The service combines e-mail with instant messaging and real-time collaboration in a way that’s as confusing as it is clever. So what is Google Wave Really

“Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference. It is typically a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions”

If you use Chrome, Firefox, or Safari as your Web browser, you should all set, but if you use Internet Explorer you’ll first need to install the Google Chrome Frame plug-in. (Sorry Opera lovers—that browser isn’t supported yet.) Just head over to wave.google.com and click on the “Request an invitation” link to apply. Once you’ve been approved, you can just sign in with your regular Google account and start using the service. The design is a three-panel layout, with navigation and contacts down the left, the inbox in the center, and the actual wave content on the right. (For purposes of discussion, a lower-case “wave” indicates an instance of communication; an upper-case Wave refers to the Google app itself.) Any of these can be minimized to give more space to the area you want to concentrate on.

Google Wave is designed as the next generation of Internet communication. It is written in Java using OpenJDK; its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Instead of sending a message and its entire thread of previous messages or requiring all responses to be stored in each user’s inbox for context, objects known as waves contain a complete thread of multimedia messages (blips) and are located on a central server. Waves are shared and collaborators can be added or removed at any point during a wave’s existence

But What Will We Use Google Wave For?

Personally I can’t wait to use it to take meeting minutes collaboratively and to co-write documents like blog posts and articles on line, also you could see using Wave as group chat—but with in line and private replies, which are key. Also there is the live multiple editing feature where more than one person can work on a document at the same time. Google Wave provides federation using an extension of XMPP, the open Wave Federation Protocol. Being an open protocol, anyone can use it to build a custom Wave system and become a wave provider. Google hopes that waves may replace e-mail as the dominant form of Internet communication. A key feature of the protocol is that waves are stored on the service provider’s servers instead of being sent between users. Waves are federated; copies of waves and wavelets are distributed by the wave provider of the originating user to the providers of all other participants in a particular wave or wavelet so all participants have immediate access to up-to-date content. The originating wave server is responsible for hosting, processing, and concurrency control of waves.

Wave is a completely extensible platform, like Firefox. Wave extensions come in two flavors: gadgets and robots.

A gadget is a piece of rich content that you can add to a wave. A few example gadgets are available in the Gadget gallery.

Here is one interesting gadget I saw on the Wav, it’s Ribbit conference call gadget. Add it to a wave, and everyone adds their phone number to it. (You only see your own number, not everyone else’s.) Click the “Start Conference” button, and everyone’s phone rings—and you’re on the phone, while you collaborate on a wave.

Robots are email addresses that you add to your contact list. Then, when you are in need of their services, you add a bot to a wave so they can perform some action on its contents. A robot can modify the contents of a wave, and several already exist that do silly to useful actions.

For example, Eliza the Robot Shrink will chat with you about anything—useful when you’re the only one of your friends who has a Wave invite and you’ve no one to talk to.

It’s hard to know what Google Wave will look like in its final form. Right now, it’s as intriguing in its possibilities as it is frustrating in its disorganization. If a third-party developer can iron out the organizational problems, Wave should be a winner. Also, more rights controls are needed—you may only want some participants to view the wave, and you might want leaders to be able to veto others’ actions. As it is now, anyone can edit any other participant’s contributions. It’s clearly not yet time to pass judgment on Wave—it’s a new implementation of an idea with lots of potential as a communication platform that could become either the wave of the future or another Google Lively.

Here is a complete Developer Preview of Google Wave:

Leave a comment if you are interested and let me see if I can get back-link to get a easy invite to Google wave.

Best 10 Add-ons for your Firefox Browser..

How many of us use the Fire-fox browser, sorry, How many of us don’t use the Firefox browser ? 🙂 So is Firefox a capable and popular Web browser, and not just because of its speed and reliability: It offers an almost endless customizability that Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari don’t try to emulate at all. Even Internet Explorer, despite its own selection of addons, Web Slices, and Accelerators, can’t match Firefox for flexibility. There are thousands of Firefox addons available that let you change the way it looks and what it can do. Chances are that someone out there has already found a way to make Firefox do anything you’ve imagined—and a lot of things you probably haven’t.

Here are some of the Best 10 Add-ons for your Firefox Browser that you will love :

1) LastPass Password Manager: Keeping your various online log-ins secure is hard enough; remembering them all can be even bigger challenge. That’s what’s great about LastPass, which can keep track of your usernames and passwords for you, so you only need to remember a single log-in (the one you use for LastPass). It also fills in forms for you, helps you manage data across multiple computers, and can help you track down passwords you may have lost on your computer.

2) ColorfulTabs: Turn your installation of Firefox into an artistic statement with ColorfulTabs. It makes every tab you open a different color, so they’re easier to tell apart at a glance—and a major part of a more vibrant, attractive Firefox window.

3) Morning Coffee: We want to check our favorite Web sites in the early mornings before work, but while we’re still groggy from sleep we can’t quite get the mouse or keyboard to work the right way. Morning Coffee saves you the trouble by letting you organize Web sites by day and open all that day’s sites when you fire up Firefox. This addon could save you so much time, maybe you can catch a few more Zs before you log on.

4) StumbleUpon: The Web can be overwhelming and finding really interesting sites next to impossible. StumbleUpon can help: Click the “Stumble” button on the toolbar it adds to be taken to a site. If you like where you end up, click the “I like it!” button; if you don’t, click the thumbs-down button. StumbleUpon learns from your answers (and those of millions of other users) to serve you better sites in the future.

5) Cooliris: Surfing the Web can be informative and fun, but even the most dynamic Web sites look pretty much the same. Not anymore. Install Cooliris to view search results on sites like Google, YouTube, and Flickr, and photos from Facebook, Picasa, and your PC as an infinity-spanning 3D wall of windows.

6) Echofon: Love Twitter, but hate having it open on your PC all day or running a separate program to follow your friends? Echofon sends notifications of your followees’ updates right to an icon in your status bar, so you can click and see them anytime you want, no matter what you’re doing. Echofon supports multiple accounts and direct messages, too.

7) ForecastFox: Never again be caught without your umbrella or sunglasses just because you forgot to check for clouds before you left the house. Install ForecastFox to view AccuWeather.com weather forecasts from all over the country and the world right in the toolbars section of your browser window.

8) GooglePedia: The wealth of information available in Wikipedia is staggering, but it can be a pain to head over to it anytime you want to look up one little thing. GooglePedia solves this problem by displaying a related Wikipedia article along with your Google search results. The links in the Wikipedia article will automatically start new Google searches using those terms.

9) Xmarks: If you’re a compulsive bookmarker and you regularly use multiple PCs, Xmarks could save you a lot of frustration. It can back up and synchronize your bookmarks and passwords, and even can help you discover new sites you might be interested in (based on what other users are bookmarking).

10) Tab Mix Plus: Tired of the same old boring tabs? Load up Tab Mix Plus, and start duplicating them, closing multiple tabs at once, controlling when and why they open, and much more. You’ll never go back to traditional tabs again.

So here you go the Best add-ons for your firefox brower, if you thing anything was missed leave a comment below. So Happy Add-Ons…