Yesterday Google announced a new, mind blowing product called Google Wave. You can watch a video of the 80 minutes developer preview at the Google I/O conference. In this blog post I'll try to summarize some of the features that I found most significant and interesting, including some highlighted snapshots from the presentation mentioned above. 

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a collaborative communication plattform that is - as far as I think - about to set a milestone in redefining the way we think about email, instant messaging, collaborative work and online communication in general. A wave can be understood in terms of a simple type of content, like a page, an email, a gallery or a discussion.

By adding other people to a wave you can invite them to take part in your wave, for example by using the inline discussion functionality that is similar to what we used to know as instant messaging. The only difference: this conversations can now be located inside a document, exactly next to the part you'd like to discuss.  

An example screen of a Google Wave - notice your contacts on the left (similar to GMail), an overview of your Waves in the middle and an example Wave on the right (including an inline discussion and some embedded images).

Real-time communication

The next interesting thing about Google Wave is its real-time communication approach. 

Imagine sitting in a cafe with a friend and having a conversation with each other. You probably wouldn't ask your friend to think about his/her sentence / thought until it's complete and then tell it to you. Usually communication is much more flowing from one person to the other.
cf. Google engineer David Wang in the video Google Wave: Live collaborative editing (3:30) 

So what they did is eliminating this constant waiting for your communication partner's response while staring at a "xyz is typing" message. In Google Wave everything you write or edit is updated in realtime at your partners screen. This includes not only text but also images you upload (via Drag&Drop) or Google Maps, which you can include inside your wave and customize to your needs (adding markers etc.).

On top of that Google Wave comes with a realtime context-sensitive spell checking feature, that seems to do a really good job. Just have a look at this example: 

"Icland is an icland" becomes "Iceland is an island" 

And last but not least - my absolute favourite - a realtime translation tool, that translates everything you write into another language if somebody doesn't speak you language. So you could for example write a message in German and your communication partner can read your text in Chinese, as it get's translated with every single character you type. It's just that awesome:

Live translation feature in Google Wave 

Collaborative Editing

Waves can also be edited like a Wiki page, which means that you can complete and edit what other people wrote before. It also works for many people editing one document / wave at the same time, as there's always a kind of colored button next to the location somebody's editing at the moment. However, you also have a fancy functionality called playback, that will let you know who changed what parts of a wave at which point of time. The whole history of a document can be replayed and recovered. 

People editing a wave at the same time, in different languages etc.  

Embedding Waves all over the internet

As we have seen above, you can upload or include all kind of media (images, videos, Google Maps) into your wave. Additionally you can also collaboratively edit a wave with your friends or colleagues. Now just image, you will also be able to embed your wave into your blog or (corporate) website and have all comments of this "blog post" be sent directly to your wave application. Your response comment (through Google Wave) will be shown to the visitor in live time on your blog. If you like visitors of your blog / website can also have the permission to directly edit the embedded wave. 

Embedding a wave into your blog.

This embedding feature doesn't only work with websites and blogs. The Google Wave team is also looking for ways to let your wave communicate with social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter ("Twave") and probably also Drupal. 

Customizability and technical stuff 

Google Wave will be published open-source and contain a new "Google Wave"-protocol which makes it possible to set up a fully customized Wave server for your own company, family or whatever you might think of. This is a big point as during the past Google always used to host all their applications (including the corresponding data) on their own servers. Now you can (hopefully) use Wave completely independent from Google. However, due to the new protocol you'll still be able to let your Wave Server interact and communicate with other Wave servers, which makes this a really, really interesting feature for companies I guess!  

Additionally you will be able to write extensions / applications, such as so called robots, that can be added to a wave (like you would add a normal person). The application you write will get an XML containing the content of the wave and simply has to return an edited XML. The wave server will handle all the rest including synchronisation between the clients etc. It'll be that easy.   

Outlook and additional information

Google Wave is still in an early development status, but it has become a quite common habit in the internet business to shorten release cycles and publish new products as early as possible. So I expect that Google will publish Wave in only a few weeks time and I can't wait to check out all the cool features and probably try to write an own extension, myself - I already have lots of ideas for that :)

Read / see / hear more about Google Wave on:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22Google%20Wave%22
Mashable: http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/ 
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Google+Wave&aq=f