Google Wave – the next tide in communication?

Google has wowed the crowds at the Google I/O keynote with news of a revolutionary new communication service, called Wave.

Basically, Wave has its sights set on a complete melding of email, IM, Facebook and Wikis with a whole bunch of neat functionality thrown in for good measure.

The idea grew form the fact that although email and IM are both highly successful web tools, they were created a while ago. Now that we have a more robust and sophisticated web, it's time to step up the game to reflect this.

Or, as one of the developers, Lars Rasmussen said: “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”
(more after the pic)




All your contacts are brought together in a Wave inbox. The idea is based on your contacts participating in a series of threads or "waves", and there can be any sort of information in these – images, movies, maps, etc.

Click on a Wave thread and you'll see all the information contained in another onscreen pane – you can chat live to contribute to the Wave in real time, and there are options to chat privately with any single person involved in a multi-person wave chat.

You can also add friends fromyour contacts to a particular wave, and anyone can play back the stream of information from the very beginning – very cool.

Sharing info from the wider web is also integrated – you can share a wave on your blog with the public, and let them observe what's going on in your wave and collaborate on public wikis.

What's more, it'll be open source, so ripe for a whole raft of cool plug-ins from budding developers.

Suddenly Facebook, IM, FriendFeed and Twitter seem positively archaic – Google Wave has the potential to completely re-write the way we communicate online.

Here's the official demo video. Have your say below...