Google Wave: The wave of the future?

Google just introduced a developer preview of a new product called Wave. This new product combines in a single application most of what you can do with email, instant messaging, wikis, forums and collaborative word processing.

The demo is quite impressive and is available on YouTube. While some may say that Google has not created anything really new with this product, just cobbled together a bunch of preexisting concepts, I feel that the vision behind Wave has a lot of merit. Combining all these things in a really usable interface is quite a challenge and despite not having used the system yet, the demo left me with the feeling that the Wave team got it right.

If you have the patience to go through the full hour and twenty minutes of the demo you will get to see that Google is pushing the line of what a web-based application can do, with real-time multi-way collaborative editing, on-the-fly spell checking in over 30 languages and other rather impresive little features.

In an interesting move Google will open source the Wave application. All the application's algorithms and formats have been published, along with the specification to the APIs that the service offers. According to Wave's creators any one will be able to use Google's code to host their own Wave servers which should seamless interact with Google's and those of any other companies. In this respect, Wave works pretty much in the same way that email does.

Also demoed where extentions to the Google Wave application which allowed it to interact with other services, such as Twitter, stock quotes, etc. The extentions seem to be the major reason for Google to have announced this product some months before it is ready. In the comming months interested developers will create dozens of extentions to the not yet released service.

Google Wave is supposed to be available for general use still within this year.