Get Ready For Google Wave

What is it?

Google Wave is the latest product by Google that is based on a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

What is a wave?

Think of it as a cross between email, shared documents and social networking - all in one user-friendly interface.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

What are the benefits?
My favourite features are:

• Adding people at any point in conversations (similar to CC'ing contacts in email but it allows responses to be sent and received in real-time).
• Publishing "waves" or conversations directly to a blog using the "Bloggy" feature. It's as simple as adding "Bloggy" to your conversation, which then notifies everyone that it will be published.
• So? This tool could leverage your online business by showing your interactions with customers if they have been published onto your blog or website.
• Language barriers are eliminated because if you're having a conversation with someone with a different language, Google Wave automatically translates what you're typing into their language - and this is all in real-time!
• So? We can now talk to anyone in the world, seamlessly.
  
• Public API, which means developers will be allowed to contribute their own ideas and to integrate the code for their own use.
• So? Google Wave could be used within businesses along-side or perhaps instead of an Intranet. It would at least ease the load on internal servers and perhaps even increase efficiency within the organisation.
  

Here's a preview [its just a short 1hr 20min video :0) of just some of the aspects of this new tool.