Yesterday, Google announced another game-changer in the world of online interaction. Their brand new Wave system will undoubtedly completely alter the way people communicate online for years to come.

Ben Parr, at Mashable has put together a great walkthrough of all of the features of Google Wave. In an attempt to not be redundant upon his article, I urge you to read his complete guide to Google Wave to get a full feel for all of the features Wave offers.

Google Wave gives users the opportunity to participate in real-time discussions with any number of people in their networks. What may begin as an email between two colleagues, can transform into a collaborative, wiki-type document that can be simultaneously contributed to by a whole team of people.

By creating a Wave, you are able to share photos, documents, links and videos by simply dragging and dropping them into the Wave. Due to the open API within Google Wave, you will be able to embed it into your blog or website where visitors are able to interact within the wave directly from your page.

“It is what email would look like if it were created today, not 40 years ago”, to quote Lars Rasmussen, the lead developer of Google Wave.

Google Wave is filled with great productivity tools like a very intuitive spell checker that takes the context of your sentence into consideration before determining if a word is misspelled, a very useful playback feature that shows all of the changes made to a document and by whom over time, and a translator that translates your message in real time as you are typing.

I strongly recommend you take the time to watch the live demonstration of Google Wave, you will see the power and potential that the system offers. Congratulations Google, you are the winner of 35 MGH WOM points for Wave!

Posted by Rusty

Yesterday, Google rolled out a whole new tool box of search options that will prove to be nothing short of a game-changer. Users will now be able to search for terms based on relevancy, recency, content type, reviews, etc.  This means that sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and review sites will have a much larger impact in the search world.

In addition to refining your search, Google has now integrated rich snippets. “Rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the price range for a local restaurant”. This puts user-generated content much more into the forefront of any given search.

This new iteration of Google search continues to prove the value of user-generated content. The companies who will make an impact in the early stages of this evolution of search are the ones who are already harnessing the power of their customers by engaging them online and encouraging them to share their thoughts and experiences.

Here at MGH we are obviously strong believers in letting consumers be heard, and are extremely excited that their voice is now an even more integral part of search results. Go do a search for your favorite product with Google’s new search options and see for yourself the power of customers talking.