Google Wave - the Future of Collaboration

The hot topic of Google IO 2009 was the preview to developers of the Google Wave collaboration platform. Google hopes that this open platform will provide a rich web based collaboration tool that
will supplement such tools as email, instant messaging and document collaboration.

The Keynote for Day 2 of Google IO 2009 was dedicated to the developer preview of Google Wave and provided an overview of the capabilities of the platform and some of the work already completed.

Some of the features demonstrated during the Keynote are:

• Message threading
• Collaborative editing
• Integration with third party tools (Twitter, Bug Tracking, Blogger)
• Image and Video Embedding
• Google Search Integration
• Language Translation
  

Although the product is not yet available to the general public, Google is actively signing up developers to the sandbox of the product to encourage development of the platform. The plan is for the platform, protocol and client code to be open sourced to encourage development by third parties. It will be possible to run your own internal version of Google Wave.

For further information on Google Wave

http://wave.google.com/
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/