So I received my invite to Google Wave one week ago, and have been playing with it off and on since then. It’s a fascinating platform, not quite what I expected, and it’s been really interesting to think about potential applications and uses of the platform.
My initial impression upon logging in was that it was a typical Google app, visually very clean, colorful, and smooth. I had some idea of how things worked from watching their tech demo video, so I began to play around with creating and joining waves. For those of you who haven’t geeked out to this as much as I have yet, “waves” are the individual threads (documents?) that the platform is built to create and share. The wave can be just yours, which would make it functionally similar to an office document, or you can collaborate on it by inviting other users to join the wave, or by making it public. Once a wave has multiple users, the users can edit the wave itself, either by changing the “base” wave or by adding comments, discussion threads, links, or other media. These individual additions each have their own privacy settings as well, so if I wanted to comment on a wave but only wanted the original author of the wave to see my comment, I could do that. The wave itself remembers each of these edits and the order in which they happened, and so all waves are able to be “replayed” so that the user can see how the document has evolved to the state it is in now.
Needless to say, Wave is very community-oriented. As a simple document creator/editor it is a decent tool, but Google Docs provides a much more versatile and stable interface. Perhaps this will change in the future, but it feels like that is not the primary goal of the Wave team here. As such, it’s not a lot of fun ...
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...ends and family, such as allowing for virtual “family albums” to exist that could be easily updated from anywhere by anyone that’s invited.
Wave is an amazing platform with huge potential and I like what I see so far, but it is still very rough around the edges. There is no easy ‘undo’ feature and Ctrl+Z doesn’t work, which can be very irritating. The service can be laggy, and occasionally crashes (although it has really awesome error screens). It still is missing a lot and has a bit of a learning curve, so if you’re a casual user, you’ll want to give Google some more time to polish this before trying it yourself. However, if you’re dying to find out how Wave works, or are just a glutton for geeky punishment, I have a few invites remaining – and I might be convinced to give them out. You can reach me from the contact form on the sidebar, or holler at me on Twitter.
5). By never losing touch with acquaintances made throughout life, we lose what has made “good old-fashioned” losing touch so good (para. 5). We lose real friendships and “long-forgotten photos and mixtapes” (para. 5). Without these natural aspects that are so important to friendship, friends have not only lost their worth, but the whole point of a friendship has been lost as well. Arguing that losing touch is a necessity of friendship, Brown suggests that maybe the issue could be resolved if only social networks would create a “Fade Utility” app that would allow unintended friends to gradually blur into a sepia cast, similar to the way unintended friends naturally fade away from our lives (para. 6). Maybe if networks treated friendships the way nature does, providing opportunities for people to reach out to lost friends if they choose, then online friendships might hold the same meaning as natural friendships, where the title “friend” is not just a banner of status, but a position in a
This era’s technology opened numerous doors for new types of communication and ways to retrieve an abundance of information. The Internet is clearly one of the greatest inventions of all time, allowing people to communicate across the globe and accumulate countless information in a matter of seconds. This phenomenon undoubtedly marked a significant progress in our society. However, it also gave rise to qu...
Google Inc. offers apps to help get work done faster and easier. They include google docs (word doc), google sheet (excel), google presentation (PowerPoint), google forms to build surveys for free, and google drawings to create charts. All these are stored in one app called google drive. Users can access it on their phones, tablets, and computers. It was launched in 2012 and can be used on MAC, PC, Android, and iOS systems.
Google makes our life easier. The company has grown from when it was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to provide around fifty different products beyond the basic Google search. With the multitude of technologies, that vary from maps to docs, Google’s job consists of making it quicker and easier to find the information needed to get what you need to your task done. Google builds the background programs and helpful tools that millions of businesses use to succeed, as well as create products for the web that help the environment, and people get what they want on the Web faster. The culture at Google is based all around the people. The people are very intelligent and determined to achieve the companies shared goals. Everyone at Google has an o...
A Google glass is a wearable computer like device with a new development technology called optical head-mounted display (OHMD). Google holds the patent for this device, and Google in collaboration with Luxottica, an eyewear company is commercializing this technology. It displays the information using a smart phone like free format and wearers communicate using the internet and also via natural language commands.
Lastly, Google does not hold formal meetings; they hold lunchtime brainstorming conversations, which ensure individual contribution. During such meetings, everyone is treated equal, and there are no leaders (Google.com, 2010). This reduces power distances between the management and the employees. Employees have the freedom to take risks, which help to build their creativity and innovation. They utilize the Maslow’s hierarchy theory of needs. This makes sure employees feel a sense of team which reduces any form of competition.
The leaders of Google have well understood the means to make Google’s company different to the other companies. They established since the beginning an original way of work, controlling the recruitment of the new members, and imposing their vision on the employees.
Google has a great customer experience due to the fact that quality and customer experience are the primary objects. The products of Google are aimed at solving customer needs and issues by the customer service provided
2. With the benefits that Google provides to its employees to maintain a balanced lifestyle, Google is an incredible company to work for although it demands long hours, dedication, and hard work from all employees. Nonetheless, even though Google is an excellent company, due to research and past examples, Google must focus on its hiring process more because many qualified employee’s leave because of their long and tough hiring process.
Today, Google has continued to expand from being a Web search company to offering an increasing array of services. It has now over 50% share of the total search market. In 2005 Google incorporated "Google Payment Corp." as he is working on a PayPal-like payment system. They have very recently released a Web-only video search engine that allows users to view videos without entering the host's site. It has been rumored also that Google plans to compete more directly with Microsoft in Internet browsing and operating systems.
Since Google has had a long and odd relationship with the whole idea of management where it not only gave freedom to its employees but knew where to draw its boundaries and set its limit it knew how to deal with the managerial problem it was facing which was causing people to leave because they were not feeling this connection to the company, it’s mission and felt that their work did not matter. Employees did not like their co-workers or bosses. Based on the quarterly done performance reviews Google decide to come up with Project
What is great about it is that you don't need to download anything. To get started, just log in to the site using your LinkedIn account and wait as the magic happens.
In January 2012, Google launched Search plus Your World and later introduced other products like Google’s Knowledge Graph and Google Now. Google Now is a feature on their search engine, which gets the corr...
Google continues to grow and innovate. Google focuses on the user and all else will follow. Since the beginning, they have focused on providing the best user experience possible, and take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve their customers(Google.com n.d.). In relation to market development and product development the core values “Its best to do one thing really, really well (Google.com n.d.),” fits in with these strategies. “You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer (Google.com n.d.),” describes Goggle’s innovation to mobile platforms. “The need for information crosses all borders (Google.com n.d.).” Google company has grown and has offices in more then 60 countries, maintaining more then 180 internet domains, and serve more then half of their results to people outside of the United States, and this relates to concentrated growth strategy. “Great just isn’t good enough(Google.com n.d.).” Google continues to strive to reach for better ways of doing things, through innovation and integration, continue to improve things in unexpected ways (Google.com n.d.).
The use of dedicated websites and applications to interact with other users or to find people with similar interests to one’s own.” – Google