Time to surf the Google Wave?

I just finished watching the 80 minute developer preview of Google Wave on YouTube and I have to say Google has managed to grab my interest in a hurry. The video was taken during a presentation at Google I/O, a developer conference for Google.

The concept behind Google Wave is certainly ambitious to say the least. If successful, Google Wave will essentially fade away the popularity of communicating via email, and replace it with Google's attempt at imagining what email would be like if it was invented today, rather than over 40 years ago (as explained in the video).

From http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html:

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

A screenshot of Google Wave in action, courtesy of Google

If you are interested enough in Google Wave, you may have already seen the developer preview video. Here I am going to say some of the key points about Google Wave as well as some of the things that impressed me, all details I have gathered from the video:

• Google Wave is a very extensible collaboration and communication tool used with a web browser. With a very modern drag and drop user interface you can instantly "drag" people into a conversation and communicate with them.
  
• Google Wave is real time, meaning you can literally watch you friends typing key for key in a conversation that you are a participant in. If you want a little more privacy you can opt to not have it show everything as you are typing. Part of the reason this is done is to maximize the amount of time that you are actually doing reading and writing rather than spending a lot of time waiting for a response.
  
• Google Wave has a playback feature to see the developments of a "wave" conversation. If you were to make a comment about something in the middle of the initial wave that was posted, the playback feature could illustrate when your comment was made in respect to all other comments and contributions to a "wave."
  
• Google Wave is being modest instead of trying to take over the web with its revolutionary concept. It is open source meaning anyone could come along and make their own version of it for implementation. With widespread adoption we could see the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft making their own versions. Along with this, Google Wave can be used on external servers outside of Google's.
• Google Wave can be expanded to do almost anything. As shown in the video one could create a "wave" to view "tweets" from their Twitter friends or create an RSVP wave to see which of their friends can attend an event. Even games of chess and sudoku can be played with friends using waves.
• An intelligent spellchecker is implemented in Google Wave that actually checks the context to suggest spelling fixes. As demonstrated in the video, if someone were to type "I love been soup," Google Wave would suggest changing "been" to "bean" and if the system is confident enough about a correction it will automatically make the correction for you.
  
• Google Wave can be embedded in third party websites seamlessly. The demo showed the usage of commenting on a blog using Google Wave embedded inside of the blog, then later showing the comment on Google Wave's official client.
• Unsurprisingly, there will be mobile versions of Google Wave for smart phones to use, such as for phones using Android and the iPhone.
  

For more information about Google Wave, you may want to look at the developer video, and checkout this blog entry posted on the Official Google Blog.