Google Wave is a drink of cold fresh water.

On Thursday, at the i/o conference, Google unveiled a project two years in development, Wave.  Answering the question, “What would email look like if it were invented today?”  Google’s answer awed me.  For the normal person, like myself, let me just say that it brings instant delivery, interaction, commenting, joint authoring, and media/attachment sharing into one mix.  It is not simply email on steroids, it is truly a new way of thinking about internet communication.  And most of the time while watching this demo, it is mind boggling.

Further mind boggling. . . it is open source.  This is not meant to run on one companies server.  This is going to run on anyone who has a server.  Kind of like a new communication client that sends pop3 and imap into oblivian.  Imagine sending a note to your coworker who is at their desk.  They see the new “wave” arrive and read it.  You have not yet turned away from the screen when they begin to type their reply.  You begin to see their reply character by character while they type.  Instantaneous.  Now wave is no longer “email” but instant messenger reinvented.  And that is just the tip of the iceberg.  You can add in other participants to your conversation, wave, and they can replay it.  That means they can play the message and see how it all took place start to finish.  No more scrolling to the bottom to see the previous conversation.  They can play it back, jump in and participate.  Wow.  I didn’t know I was thirsty but Google Wave is like a refreshing glass of cold water on a warm day.

I love the name of  Wave.  Communication is not meant to be separate individual messages, but all rather ripples of water, waves, that join together and separate.  I would love to further explain it, if I had the right words, but I have touched only the tip of this tsnami of a Wave.  There are embedding API’s for your website, extension API’s, as well as the server software itself.  For now do this.  Know that it is scheduled for release later in the year.  When it is released we will see a communication revolution that will overwhelm email and the social networking sites.  Secondly, head on over to the landing page for Google and watch the demo video.  Thirdly, take a drink of the refreshing Wave.