Google Wave Will Change Online Communication

I heard a bunch of chatter this morning on twitter about a new application and service that’s under development by Google called Google Wave. My initial thoughts were how big of a deal is this? Google is regularly producing some great tools and products, but how much could communication on the web really change? The video below is of a presentation of Google Wave that was done at the Google I/O conference. It’s over an hour long, but it’s pretty impressive!

Image a merging of email, instant messaging, live updating, photo sharing, editing, cooperative document development and even more. Someone can be added to the conversation at anytime and can rewind the updates and see how messages were added in sequence to the stream of thought.

The tool can be embedded in websites, blogs, updated live in all places and all changes are displayed live. Private messaging, spell check, sharing, it’s all here. Oh, and it’s not using any new platform. It’s all running in current browsers with current technology, just some amazing development and coding from Google.

And all that is just in the first 30 minutes of the video above! Looking forward to see what else can be done. Like this, four people dynamically editing the same document and everyone seeing everyone’s updates concurrently.

What do you think? Will this really change communication online forever? I can easily see Gmail taking on the features and functionality of Google Wave as soon as it’s available.

More information about Google Wave:

• Product wave.google.com
• Platform code.google.com/apis/wave
• Protocol www.waveprotocol.org