It's still in development, but the world got a preview a few days ago with a developer preview and what we saw is 'way cool'. I can't wait to ride the Wave.

Google Wave co-creator Lars Rasmussen is also one of the people behind the development of Google Maps.

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http://wave.google.com/

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He wrote on the official Google blog: 'A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

'In Google Wave 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.'

The term wave is synonymous with 'threaded conversation'.

It's a bit like the history function that some IM services offer but can include whole group of people using a range of content and media.

You'll start hearing people talk about wavelets too. This is a conversation thread that is a subset of a wave, but you can create and manage them separately from the wave. It's a bit like having a chat with the person beside you when seated at a large dinner party.

Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

• The Google Wave product is the web application people will use to access the service and includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop.


• It's also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build new extensions that work inside waves.


• As a protocol it provides a format for storing and the means of sharing content and provides the 'real-time' aspect of the service. The protocol is designed to be interoperable and will be open source to encourage its adoption.

Google Wave puts a whole new complexion on email by combining with it everything that is good about Twitter, wiki, Facebook and Friendfeed.

It seems that the era of the real-time web in which communication, search, collaboration will take on a whole new impetus.

If you think the world is already 'running at Internet speed' Google Wave is about up the pace again.

It will allow you to replay conversations because it records the entire sequence of communication. You can go back up and add a comment anywhere into the thread and it will be seen in real time by your collaborators and saved for future reference.

You'll be able to just drag files from your desktop into the wave and it will be instantly available to your collaborators.

And the interaction isn't limited to humans; robots are invited too. These automated participants provide updates from outside sources, much like Twitter bots. Waves can also be taken from Google into any environment.

They can easily be embedded into a website or blogsite giving visitors an easy-to-use chatroom right on a given web property.

It will certainly take commenting to a whole new level.

Google has opened wave up to the developer community already so by the time it's fully launched there should be a raft of new applications ready to use.

This will be good news for gamers, but you just have to look at Android to see the range of applications that could result.

In fact, almost any iGoogle or OpenSocial gadget can run within Google Wave meaning there are already thousands of applications at our fingertips.

So it's cool, fun and is going to change everything. But will it work in business?

I'm not convinced that companies are ready to give up email. In fact, I don't think their even close. Most companies are heavily invested, both financially and emotionally, in email and when you consider that many are already dragging their heels when it comes to cloud computing I think it's safe to say they won't be catching the wave any time soon of their own volition.

However, as we have already seen with Facebook and Twitter, once people, both staff and management, start using Wave independently, it won't be long before they start agitating to use it at work.

>> Sherrilynne Starkie is the managing partner of Strive Public Relations, a strategic communications consultancy serving the Isle of Man. Visit her business blog, www.strivepr.com/notes or follow her on twitter.com/sherrilynne