Google Wave Gets Copenhagen Workout at the Climate Change Debate

Google Wave is proving itself to be the perfect platform to discuss climate change. Debatewise  Global Youth Panel (GYP) is using the technoloy to spark discussion  and debate from young people about the state of the planet. During the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Take that Twitter.

More than 1,000 members of the Debatewise Global Youth Panel (GYP), aged between 14 and 25, discussed the pros and cons of the conference using Google's new instant messaging platform, launched earlier in the year. It's hoped the parrallel discussions will give a good measure of how young people around the world feel about climate change and the steps being taken to tackle it.

For Debatewise founder David Crane GoogleWave was the perfect platform for debate:

"Google Wave has made it possible for us to get a large group of young
people from over 100 different countries collaborating and debating in real time. We've found people from different countries eager to express their views on climate change and keen to understand the impact it might have on the people they're debating with."

Google Wave provides simultaneous real-time email and instant messaging and lets users communicate without having to arduously email back and forth. It is, of course, the latest weeapon in Google's arsenal in monopolising the web as it morphes into something much more social (Friend Feed,/Twitter and social search listings in SERPs for instance).

Wave works like this: you go to any web page, like you would with Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo, and open a "wave". As you type the words on your "wave", a friend can see what you've written on their own web page and start chattting with you. You can have as many people on your screen as you want, at any one time, and as Google themselves say it's equal parts conversation as it is document.

Useful for work projects it may be and in the words of David Crane, "it has significantly increased the ability of the panel to share their knowledge and to work together. It's a tool negotiators would find very useful when everyone leaves Copenhagen".

What better reason to get yourself acquainted.

Picture courtesy of marketingfacts. Some rights reserved.