Last June during their IO 2009 meeting Google announced the development of a technology that might change the way we communicate and collaborate through the web.

This technology, presented under the name WAVE was developed by the same people who created Google Maps and a support team in Sydney, Australia, and is described by their creators as “what email would be if it was to be created today”

Email was created 40 years ago as a communication tool that only was capable of handling text. As technology advanced, new types of information were incorporated to the daily exchange such as images, audio and video; however, email programs managed to handle these new requirements in a very efficient way.

Today evolution has brought new mechanisms for communication that people use in their daily lives besides email. In fact, technologies such as instant messaging, chat, cell phones, etc, are used as alternate – complementary – non related tools to attend our communication needs.

Wave will present an integrated solution to these needs by offering a mechanism where they will interact under a natural platform. In fact, their creators describe it as a communications platform that will handle instant messaging, group or private conversations, documents exchange, documents collaboration, wiki type site building and more.  In a few words, just what you actually do with email plus several other programs and sites, joined in a single and simple window; managed by the browser of your choice, without installing any program on your PC and from any operating system (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc).

If this description has not amazed you yet then here are some more details that will be integrated in the product:

-       Online spelling dictionary with predictive text capacity.

-       Live transmitting of every word/character of your message.

-       Search tool to embed web search capacity in the conversation ‘Searchy’ feature.

-       Drag and drop contacts into the wave.

-       Play back feature, which allows you to keep track of the history of each wave from creation to last input in movie motion.

-       Create group albums by dragging and dropping the participants photos into the wave.

-       Embed the whole wave into a blog ‘Bloggy’ feature.

-       Discussion and content collaboration capacity, ideal for planning your projects, trips, events, etc.

-       International language input method.

-       Live editing.

-       ‘Yes, No, Maybe’ gadget to organise responses.

-       Twitter capacity ’Twave’ – a Wave of tweets.

-       Insert a Google map by highlighting a location name in your Wave. Add comments and markers to your map and use the polygon tool to highlight specific areas.

-       My very favourite!!!!! ‘Instant translation to 40 languages if any of the parties does not speak your language’.

In summary, its an email + chat + instant messaging + document collaboration + document sharing and editing + translation tool + online dictionary + more, more… much more! All integrated in a single window.

The product will be released by the end of this year. The effects this will have in the way people communicate is not easy to predict, but as we see it, two things look clear from now:

Our current email communication will become obsolete. Group integration will be enforced, as the language barriers no longer will be a limitation.

Want to add your own prediction? Please send us your comments on this post and remember to ‘Bookmark it’ if you liked it.

Michael Gomez

‘The Techy Guy’ at Marketing for Small Businesses

For a more detailed description visit http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html