The guys in Googlewho brought you Google maps have been working on something just as revolutionary. A complete rethink of he email concept. The email is out, the ‘wave’ is in.
A wave is a bit like a cross between an email, a shared document and a forum post. Everyone who ‘receives’ the wave looks at the same document. Anyone on that recipient list can add to it, much as you would add comments to an email and then ‘reply-all’ to update everyone. The big difference is that there is only one copy of the wave and everyone is looking at the same thing. So when you update the wave everyone sees your update – in real time to it replaces email and messenger.
When you add to a wave you are clearly identified, and you can add semi-private updates. You can even replay the wave and see the additions made in the order they were added.
Anyone who sees the presentation at http://wave.google.comis going to see how much better this all works than regular email. There are other clever things like dragging and dropping images, a smart API, spell checker that seems to be more intelligent than most, real-time translation into other languages, a serious API and so on… However there are few issues:
During the presentation their network went down. No network no wave. However Google Gears has the possibility of creating local copies of things like this so this may not be such a big issue.
This is a hosted application and no corporate is going to allow its precious data to be held or even accessed externally. So email is likely to remain. Is there going to be a clever way of integrating wave with email? My brain hurts when I try and figure that out.
This is an exciting product. Forget messenger applications because this one is messnger on steroids. Will it replace email? I doubt it – sadly.
Bob Browning's blog 
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