One of Google's currently very highly-anticipated forthcoming products is Google Wave, due for release later this year. For those new to it, it is an open source web-based communications platform that will seek to integrate numerous internet communication facilities into one ambitious service - from webmail and instant messaging to Facebook-syle group discussion threads and more.
The big idea is basically to combine many of the best features of all these different formats into the 'wave' which will be always online and accesible to participants in the exchange. Updates will be shown in real time (including new additions as they are typed, if so desired), and essentially the whole venture seems to promise to make messy email exchanges between multiple recipients and with a lengthy (and clumsy) message history a thing of the past.
Anyway things are still in the early stages (the product was only announced a couple of months ago) but here's a quick link to a fascinating high quality presentation about it from Google I/O 2009 for anyone looking for a good intro into something which will no doubt become fairly significant in coming months:
Dejan Levi
