I've been so busy lately it's taken me a while to get round to posting about this one. Now that the web development news is quietening down a little I thought I'd take a look at this new Google product. I have heard people refer to it as being pipped to the post by Opera Unite, except I see Google Wave as a very different product. Where Opera Unite is about social browsing, Google Wave is more about collaboration on work.
How Google Wave is similar to Opera Unite is that they both exist as extensions to their browsers and provide a new way to interact with other people. Google Wave brings chat, email, web feeds, and document sharing into the Chrome interface to make it easier for people to collaborate. Okay, they do sound incredibly similar, and Google Wave may have come first, but what features they bother cover I think Opera Unite does better. For the time being the only advantage that Google Wave holds over Opera Unite is when it comes to multiple people needing to work on the same document - however this can already be achieved using Google Docs.
