by Michael Penney

So by now, everyone who follows technology has at least heard of Google Wave. And if you haven’t, you need to crawl out from under that rock and take a peek at what is going on, because this is big.

Google Wave, in simplest terms, is supposed to be the second iteration of email. It’s a next-generation communications technology that takes all the best things about all the different ways we communicate, and puts them into one tool. It works under the assumption that you don’t need to go to different places or services to send email, use IM, collaborate on documents, or share files or photos. It also changes how we think of email as an object.

Email was invented 40 years ago. It mimics snail mail, in that you write your message, and you send it off where it needs to go. Your recipient can then take that message and reply to it, forward it, or whatever. And this works. It’s worked for a long time. But in today’s world, we often have to communicate on a larger spectrum. Maybe you need to CC your boss on the email, or keep someone else up to date on what’s been said. And if you’re not careful about replying properly, different forks of the messages can be created, and people end up on different pages, and it becomes a mess (which is described really well in the video below).

Google Wave starts out with the concept of a shared conversation. You create a wave, and then you add people to it. A wave is one shared document that everyone has access to. There’s only one copy, so everyone stays up to date. And if you add more people later on, they can play back the whole wave from the very first message, to see how the conversation evolved, and then add their own insight.

I am very excited about getting an opportunity to use Google Wave, and I hope you are too. If you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend checking out the developer preview video. It’s 80 minutes long, so set aside some time to get through it. If you just can’t sit still that long, or would like just a quick overview of what Wave is, and how it’s different from email, check out the two-minute video below.

By far, the most important part of Google Wave, is that it is an open-sourced protocol. Google won’t be the only ones giving people wave accounts, once this picks up. Just like email is today, you will have a choice in your provider, and everyone will be able to communicate together.

Here’s to a bright future of communication!