The next big wave from Google is the Google Wave. In the recent Google I/O event, Google showed a demo of its latest upcoming project, the Google Wave. From the looks of it, Google Wave is the convergence of Email, Instant Messaging, Collaboration and Social Networking.

When Google launched Gmail, the traditional email way of ‘Reply’, ‘Reply to All’ concepts changed dramatically as Gmail introduced the new concept of conversations. Gmail automatically grouped related emails in a single conversation for ease of management of emails. With Google Wave, you just start a new wave, instead of creating an email. You then drag and drop your contacts to this new wave which is immediately visible to the selected contacts real time. Now moving ahead from the conversation concept, the wave obviously takes the inverted tree structure. Therefore, any single conversation within this wave can branch out in its own. For example the wave lets the participants to add, modify content real time under any nodes which is immediately available for the rest to view and edit.

Now if it is quite confusing, think of the combination of Email and Instant Messaging into a single interface. That is the wave. Participants can reply, chat, in real time. In traditional IM clients including Google Talk, half the time is spent on waiting for the other party to type something. While he/she is typing, you only see ’so and so is typing’ until the user hits the submit button. In Google Wave, since it is real-time, as you start typing, the other participant can view as you type, letter by letter (that’s true). This makes the conversation quite fast and saves tremendous amount of time compared to normal IM clients.

In addition to Email and IM, Google Wave now combines collaboration in to the same interface. So teams can easily create a wave, edit it simultaneously, embed images, links etc into this wave and makes real-time collaboration between teams fast and easy. This is especially true for enterprises where some still practice the common shared folder with multiple sub folders and multiple versions which makes organizing the documents a nightmare. Even with SharePoint you need to check in and check out which makes real-time multiple edits impossible. With Google Wave real time multiple edits works great.

Google Wave APIs makes it easy for developers to create Google wave extensions. There is no limit to how these extensions can be used. At least in the demo, a few great extensions were shown. One very interesting and useful feature was the automatic language translator. So if you happen to have a Chinese girl friend and you no nuts about Chinese language then you could use the Google Wave to type in English while your Chinese girlfriend will see real time Chinese translation of what you have typed. She then can reply in Chinese which is automatically translated on the fly and you see the English version of the text as she types in Chinese word by word.

A few more promising features in the demo included, integration to blogs, twitter and other external sites. Where you can embed and converse between a Wave and a blog or a twitter which is quite cool as when someone replies to a blog comment, it is automatically embedded in the Wave real time. Another rich feature is the images integration into Waves. You could just drag and drop images to your waves, share them, comment on them etc with relative ease.

The best part of all this is of course Google’s trademark search facility in Google Wave. You can search anything and everything in your Google Waves which makes the whole experience richer.

Google Wave Terminology

A wave is a threaded conversation, consisting of one or more participants. The wave is a dynamic entity which contains state and stores historical information. A wave is a living thing, with participants communicating and modifying the wave in real time. A wave serves as a container for one or more wavelets defined below.

A wavelet is a threaded conversation that is spawned from a wave (including the initial conversation). Wavelets serve as the container for one or more messages, known as blips. The wavelet is the basic unit of access control for data in the wave. All participants on a wavelet have full read/write access to all of the content within the wavelet. As well, all events that occur within the Google Wave APIs operate on wavelet level or lower.

When you spawn a wavelet from within a wave, you do not inherit any access permissions from the parent wavelet. During the lifetime of a wave, you may spawn private conversations, which become separate wavelets, but are bundled together within the same “wave.” Since events occur at the wavelet level or below, the context of an event is restricted to a single wavelet. A wavelet may be created and managed with a robot as its only participant. This allows the robot to use the wavelet effectively as a private data document. These data documents are never rendered/revealed to the user and may contain structured or unstructured data about the wavelet.

A blip is the basic unit of conversation and consists of a single messages which appears on a wavelet. Blips may either be drafts or published. Blips manage their content through their document, defined below. Blips may also contain other blips as children, forming a blip hierarchy. Each wavelet always consists of at least one root blip.

A document is the content attached to a blip. This document consists of XML which can be retrieved, modified or added by the API. Generally, you manage the document through convenience methods rather than through direct manipulation of the XML data structure.

Your Gmail is about to undergo an extreme makeover- social networking style. Recent Google announced the release of Google Wave. Essentially, it’s kind of like Google’s version of Facebook, Twitter, Gmail on steroids but with real-time capabilities.

The basic idea is that you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content – it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Google’s multi-layered media format in the user interface provides users wit the tools for media collabration  and full editing controls to each participant.

Wave’s Primary features include:

• Google Wave Concurrency: Natural language tools extending control technology provides real-time collaboration on a wave edit rich media at the same time.
• Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction.
• Google Wave APIs:Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets.

Fans of Google’s other services and tools such as Analytics, Google Earth, Google Reader and Google News should welcome the Wave with open arms.No official launch date has been released, but you can sign up for the wave at wave.google.com.

Described by Google as “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web,” many industry pundits and technology Bloggers says it’s more like creating a bunch of independent online social networks that are based on a marriage of email and instant messaging. Each “page” or online social networking area is called a “wave.” Within it you can have conversations and share documents in real time. It’s not just about text either. The platform allows people to communicate and collaborate with any form of “rich media” (this includes text, photos, videos, maps and more). Any participant can reply and connect anywhere in the message as well as being able to edit the content and add participants. The waves also include a “playback” feature that allows people who may have joined later in the wave to “rewind” all of the content.

Is Google Wave the next generation of the live web?

While the platform is still in development (it’s looking like it will be publicly available later in the year), one of the major features and functionality that Google is promoting is how “live” the platform is. This includes a live transmission as you type (I seem to recall ICQ instant messaging having this feature as well) which will enable people to have faster conversations, see edits as they are happening and interact in real-time.

The platform is also pushing the ability to drag and drop items and make the Web a much more friendlier/easier place for everyone to connect, share, build and grow.

Is Google Wave good for Marketers?

It is way too early to tell, but there are some indications that if a platform like Google Wave does take off, it will fragment the concept of an online social network and splinter it down to a place where these areas are not used by masses to congregate and boast how many friends or connections they have, but perhaps the metric becomes how many waves individuals are engaged with and how active the conversation and collaboration is.

The platform obviously creates much more targeted inventory for advertising with the Google AdWords model (much like it does over at Gmail), but depending on how open or private these waves will be, this could also be one of those moments in time where people shift from having their opinions out in public, back into smaller, cozier and more personal conversations in a Google Wave.

Imagine brands inviting their consumers into a Google Wave – be it for customer service, product development or simply to discuss brand evangelism. This could become the highly personalized online social network many of us have been waiting for.

In the meantime, you can watch the hour-plus-long video of the unveiling of Google Wave right here:

Just the other day I was using my email and I found myself scoffing with disgust. “This is so last century!”

Okay, not really. But apparently down at Google Australia, that’s exactly what they’ve been thinking lately-and Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon came up with a way to revolutionize email and instant messaging called Google Wave. As Lars says, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

After a long demo, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler was inclined to agree with the seeming overstatement. Just reading about this new product is making my head spin. The integration of social and email here goes WAY beyond having a pane for GTalk in your Gmail.

The first two columns look pretty familiar if you’re used to the standard Gmail set up: the left-hand navigation has your folders and mailbox features as well as your GTalk contacts. The middle column has the inbox-but the difference here is that these aren’t individual messages, like you’d see in most mail clients, or even threaded “conversations” like you see in Gmail-these are the Waves that give the product its name.

How are Waves different from standard email? Well, for one thing you can communicate in not only “delay time,” like we do with email, but also real time (if you’re both online). And not just like IM, but see-as-you-type real time (though you can enable a “draft” feature if you want your friends to wait and see). Unlike email and even Gmail, you can click anywhere to start typing a reply to your friend’s messages-or other content, since you can include pictures, event invitations, games, maps, Wiki-style content and more.

Waves can also feature more than two people-just drag a friend’s photo from your contacts and drop it in the Wave to add them. They can sue the Playback feature to catch up on what you’ve been discussion.

Your head spinning yet? ‘Cause we’re just getting started.

Waves can remain private in your inbox or be published on the web, fully indexable by search engines. (They say that public waves are clearly marked as such in your inbox and in the wave itself.)

But that’s just the beginning of Wave’s portability. In the second phase of development, Waves will also integrate with other websites as a platform-for example, you could include a post from your blog in a Wave to discuss with friends, and have their comments in the Wave integrate with the comments on your blog (though all the details haven’t been hammered out on that one). Other commenters can also join in the wave.

And it’s not just blogs: the Google Wave team also sees lots of other kinds of sites using Wave for everything from customer service interface to contributor group chats.

And as if all that weren’t enough, Google’s also working hard with developers to make sure that the system is fully featured and ready for the masses. They have 50 internal Google developers who’ve created apps for Wave.

The APIs for Wave open tomorrow (tomorrow), but eventually the whole system is going open source as a protocol for its third phase. Waveprotocol.org has more details on that phase.

Which I know is making you wonder just when this is going to roll out. Google showed the launch at Google I/O, and though APIs are going to be available tomorrow, Wave itself is just a little ahead of its time. Google says its engineers are looking forward to HTML 5, which will enable Wave to operate within the browser without any necessary plugins (well, the “modern” browser, they say to exclude Internet Explorer).

And THAT is all. For now. You can sign up to be notified of the public launch at http://wave.google.com/.

So, if you’ve made it this far, what do you think? Are you salivating for the latest evolution of Internet communication, or are you shaking your fist at your monitor shouting “you crazy kids and your new fangled contraptions!”?