Google have announced something really rather interesting called Wave.
(Warning: looooooong video)
Essentially,
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.
Lots of people are very excited about it. Take TechCrunch, for example:
Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale.
What is really interesting is the way that Wave will work as an open standard, with APIs available to developers to make it possible to embed the way Wave does things into other applications.
Of course, before we get too excited about Wave, we need to remember Knol, Sites (which I actually quite like, but no-one else seems to) and Base. Google gets a lot of stuff wrong.
But when they get things right, such as with Gmail and of course search, the results can be devastating. For that reason alone, it’s vital to keep up with Wave and its development.
