Google Unveils Google Wave

What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is a new tool and model for communication and collaboration on the web.  It is designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.

Google Wave users can create objects or hosted conversations called Waves.  According to Google, Waves are “equal parts conversation and document” wherein people can communicate and work together  in new and more effective and simple ways with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.  Waves contain a complete thread of messages or blips.  Users or participants in a wave can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process.

Waves are live: all replies/edits are seen real-time, letter by letter, as they are typed by the other collaborators. Watch the demo video below.

As it is designed to be the future of email, it is said that Google Wave may soon replace the 40 year old e-mail protocol with its  Wave protocol, succeeding email as the dominant form of Internet communication.

Screenshot

Google Wave was unveiled by Google at Google I/O on 28 May 2009.  This web application is expected to be released later this year.  It is currently available in a developer preview for sandbox access.

Subscribe and be notified when it’s ready!

ASIDE

What is Google I/O?
Google I/O was a web developer-focused conference organized by Google to discuss web applications using Google and open web technologies. It was scheduled for May 27–28, 2009, at Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. Major themes of the 2009 event span several Google products and technologies, namely – Android, App Engine, Chromium, Google Web Toolkit, OpenSocial, Google AJAX APIs, and the newly announced Google Wave.

The conference was styled similar to previous Google developer conferences, such as Google Developer Day in May 2007 and Geo Developer Day in May 2006. Its first conference was held on May 28-29, 2008, at the same location with an attendance of about 3,000 developers. There were more than 100 technical sessions. [src: wikipedia.org]