Google has unveiled a distributed, peer-to-peer collaboration and conversation platform called Wave. Several newsletter readers have written to suggest that the Wave may offer tremendous potential for genealogy projects, especially for group efforts when multiple people are working towards a common goal. This could be as informal as two cousins cooperating with their research efforts or as formal as a one-name society or a family society of 50 people or more working to document everyone of a particular surname or documenting all the descendants of a common ancestor.
Click on the thumbnail image to the left to see a larger image of a typical (non-genealogy) Wave.
Developers are being invited to join the open source project that has been formed to create a Google Wave Federation Protocol, which will underlie the system. Anyone will be able to create a 'wave,' which is a type of hosted conversation, Google has said. Waves will essentially incorporate real-time dialogue, photos, videos, maps, documents and other information forms within a single, shared communications space. Developers can also work on embedding waves into websites, or creating multimedia robots and gadgets that can be incorporated within the Google Wave client.
The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games or discuss a recent news.
In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content -- it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave to see how it evolved.
More information can be found at http://googleblog.blogspot.com.
Is anyone reading this have Eastman ancestry and would be interested in creating an "Eastman Genealogy Wave?"
Dick, who wouldn't like to have a fellow genealogist with your computer expertise set up such a collaboration? Now if I could only find an Eastman in my ancestry...!
Posted by: Christine Czarnecki | May 29, 2009 at 11:00 AM
I am very excited about this and think it has much potential for collaboration!
Posted by: Taneya | May 29, 2009 at 05:22 PM
Dick- You must have more than the Eastman name to have searched. Why not add the others. I can imagine that I will pretend to be related to one of them just to get into your area of help and advice.
Posted by: John Carlson | May 29, 2009 at 07:04 PM
Genealogy projects were what immediately sprang to my mind also, when viewing the google video. And it's being open sourced! I believe this is the future, whether Google's platform or another very similar wins out.
Posted by: Valorie Zimmerman | May 30, 2009 at 01:32 AM
Dick- I have 16 Eastman's in my LEIGHTON LEGACY ON CD. I would be happy to share if you are interested.
Posted by: Mary Leighton Proebstle | May 30, 2009 at 09:37 AM
To Mary: Great! I would love to set up a surname project on Google Wave once it becomes available. Today, it isn't much more than a concept and a press release. However, the Google programmers presumably are working on it and I expect Wave to become available within a few months. No promises here, I need to first see just how complex it is to set up. Next, while it sounds like a good application for genealogy purposes, we all should reserve judgment until we see the final product.
Stay tuned...
- Dick Eastman
Posted by: Dick Eastman | May 30, 2009 at 11:42 AM
Sounds like an interesting feature. I'll be sure to check it out. Maybe I can set up something with some of my more distant relatives, to bring together family lines in a new and interesting way. Thanks for telling us about this!
Posted by: Stephanie at the Irish Genealogical Research blog | May 30, 2009 at 10:30 PM
Dick: From what I can tell, Wave will be terrific for discrete topics and single-issue collaborations. The way it combines instant messaging and wiki collaboration features is impressive. But the organizational elements will be left to the user. Someone like you could transform a Wave into a persistent genealogical resource but I don't think the average user could or would. WikiTree.com (my own project) and other sites that are specialized for family history collaboration will be more useful for sorting and preserving family history. Of course, I'll be watching for ways to incorporate Waves into WikiTree.
Posted by: Chris Whitten | June 01, 2009 at 01:51 PM