Google Wave Preview

Google Wave is a new project by Google, still in development, yet set for release later this year. It will be an integrated communications and collaboration platform. This means that the one web-based application will be able to handle email, chat, photo-sharing and collaborative editing features – as currently seen in Google Docs. The documents will be handled in ‘waves’ which have been described by Google as part ‘conversation’ and part ‘document’.

This seems to be something of a genre-changing move by Google and highlights the company’s drive to be at the cutting edge of online technical innovation. The keyword here is integration. Google believes that by integrating a number of tools into one platform, productivity and collaboration will increase, and hence the value-add to the user.

Users will be able to create ‘waves,’ and add documents and collaborators to it. The system will feature concurrent rich-text editing, as well as email and IM-like messaging functions. Lars Rasmussen, one of the co-founders and lead engineers behind this project, especially stressed the real-time nature of Wave, where edits to a wave, be they new messages or edits in a document, appear immediately on the screens of all participants.

This post was inspired by ReadWriteWeb’s article: Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email.