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

Image via WikipediaThis is just a quick rant. Meets are a pain in the butt. I mean, sometimes it’s necessary to meet and talk about a project or get people up to speed on the latest information. We have them each week for the bloggers and our group and I usually held a network meeting each week at my last company but to have meetings to decide what will be accomplished at the next meeting is rediculous.

People who set these types of meetings up — and you know who you are — stop it! Email and IM are great tools to collaborate while getting work done. A quick, “Who will do the research on the new cat toy?” email will do wonders. It doesn’t take blocking out 30 minutes of someone else’s time to decide on this.

Oh yeah, and when the research comes in, email it out to the group before the meeting. It’s of almost no use if people have to thumb through 30 pages of junk at a meeting table before they can even start to talk. Archives, message boards, wikis and more are great tools that businesses and groups of people should not take lightly. They are productivity tools for a reason. They increase it.