NEWS
It's becoming clear that Google Wave, which is slowly emerging from closed beta, has the potential to be much more than a text-messaging platform. As the telecommunications platform company Ribbit shows - as does a videoconference app from 6 Rounds - Wave's architecture makes it a compelling platform for real-time streaming communication.
The Ribbit team recently showed off their prototype widget, which lets Wave users quickly set up a conference room inside a "wave" message on the service. Once you add the Ribbit conference widget to a wave, everyone in it becomes part of a potential voice chat. Users need to enter their phone numbers, which remain hidden from other users. Then anyone in the wave can call all the participants at once to start a conference.
The Ribbit integration into Wave shows how easy it is to get a conference going that's clearly related to a document (a wave) that a team is already working on. You also get a dashboard view of your conference where you can see who's on and who's not, and drop callers mid-stream.
Future additions to the service will include options to record calls and transcribe them.
The 6 Rounds concept is similar to Ribbit, although with more of a focus on fun videoconferencing and the sharing of YouTube videos. But the idea is the same: Within a group on Wave, you can quickly add a conferencing widget to bring people into a conversation.
It looks like both of these apps blend perfectly with the Wave experience, which is part email, part IM, part groupware. They show how, in a modern communications system, the barriers between text and voice and video communication, and more interestingly between asynchronous and real-time communication, really do begin to dissolve.
What's not yet clear is how or if Google will integrate Google Voice into Wave.
