As new communication mediums such as Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly more popular; Google has been hard at work trying to create a service that would incorporate the same social aspects of Facebook and Twitter, but at the same time revolutionize the way that people interact online. This highly anticipated Google feature titled Google Wave was created by the same team that developed the break through Google Maps. While brainstorming ideas prior to the creation of Wave, Google designers aimed to "recreate" email as if Google invented it today. Google describes Wave as "an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more." What is so amazing about this service is that with all of its capabilities, Wave is operated entirely through an HTML browser such as Firefox and Safari.

A "wave" is one individual conversation, similar to an instant message or email except more than one person can be included in a wave, in fact there is no limit to how many people can be involved in a conversation. People can be added or removed from the Wave at your disposal with the correct administrative rights. One of the most amazing aspects of Wave is the play back option. If someone enters into a wave late, they have the ability to play back through the message and catch up on what they missed. If the reader has insight that was not included in the prior discussion they are able to include a response to a particular statement, which will appear in the other members Waves. Waves can be saved and organized for future reference and can be exported into a file format for easy access. Photos can be dragged directly from a local hard drive right on to a Wave, which then gives every member of the wave the ability to change the photo caption.

One of the more interesting aspects of Wave is its usage in blogging, in which an interactive wave can be input directly into the blog. Users can play back a Wave featured on a blog, and comment directly into the Wave, which will be sent simultaneously to the creator of the original Wave in real time. This would be great for business oriented blogs. Users could upload a collaborative document to a blog, and readers can see each step of the documents production, as well as who came up with each idea, and who made each change.

This is just the surface of what Google Wave is capable of doing. Think of a Wave not as just an instant message window, but as a document that can be changed by numerous people simultaneously. This is where the light switch went on for many businesses that were recently pitched the idea of a google Wave. Googlewaveblogger.com writes; "The industries I briefed immediately saw the great collaboration promise that this tool could bring to their industry." By collaborating with Google Voice, and online phone company Ribbit, Waves have the potential to recreate the way that we conduct video conferences. Imagine a one stop shop program where people can view a live video of each member of the wave, hear comments, view changes that are being made to any file, and can message one another privately without the rest of the group knowing. In a sense this reconstructs every aspect of a meeting, expect for the face to face interactions. "Imagine the great collaborative meetings we could have with real-time collaboration, not the "Go-to-meeting" or "web-ex" style today with one controller."

Google Wave was recently released on a limited preview basis; requests to join can be taken at http://wave.google.com/help/wave/closed.html Requests could take awhile to recieve usage of Google Wave, but a limited number of invites are given to a select number of individuals that have access to Wave. If you know someone that is using the service, check with them about an invite for yourself.