Google Wave is a new concept from a Google team based in Sydney, Australia. It’s coined as an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration” and aims to combine many different aspects of Internet communication technology into a single place and it’s looking like it could be the next big thing in communication and collaboration on the net. Google Wave is a cross between email, instant messaging, wikis, blogs and forums. Initially the Wave client would appear, to the regular user, much the same as a regular webmail client with folders such as Inbox, Spam and Trash

listed on the left, messages listed down the middle, and the currently highlighted message displayed on the right.

From here things start to get a little different... You can create a new wave, much as you would an email message, but instead of sending the wave to a list of recipients, you subscribe those recipients to the wave, and since the wave exists much like a forum thread or blog article, you can subscribe additional recipients on the fly.

Waves are real-time, meaning that users subscribed to a wave will be able to see entries immediately as they’re entered, just like an instant messaging program. Likewise (and this is where the collaboration features really start to show), subscribed users are able to type directly back into the same wave, in real-time, with all users seeing the updated content. Content doesn’t have to be just text either; users are able to drop in pictures, videos, attachments and gadgets such as user polls and interactive maps.

Extensions are supported that would offer advanced integration features, such as spell checking, automated language translation and the ability to have “robots” act as a user on the wave that can automate certain tasks and provide integration with external sources such as blogs or newsfeeds.

Another cool feature of a wave is called playback. As you could imagine a wave with lots of different users editing in different places could get a little confusing especially if you join a wave later on in its life. Playback lets you play the wave from its creation through to its current state, showing you what edits have been made over time which may be invaluable to understand the flow of a given wave conversation.

Currently Google Wave is in limited preview and is available through invitation only. At this stage it is not known when it will be available for general release but there is quite a buzz in the online community who are keen to see just where this sort of technology can take us in the near future.