Today Google announced its newest product: Google Buzz. It's a social networking feature directly integrated into Google Mail and lets you post status updates, images and videos - simply all social content you'd probably like to share with others.

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).