GizmoGurus

Got an hour or two? If you haven’t checked out Google Wave, here’s a little summary:

Unveiled at G10. Lars and Jens Rasmussen, from such revolutionary apps as Google Maps, Google Wave is “part conversation, part document”. That’s my favorite tagline so far, but it’s hard to boil Wave down to a single catchphrase. This is Google’s attempt to look at email “as if it were invented today”, and not 40 years ago and it is not an understatement to say that its pushing the limit of what’s possible inside a web browser.

A “Wave” is a live email, if you will. It starts off as a blank document, to which you add participants and content. Members of the Wave can then can add blog-style threaded comments to any part of the message, which you can then reply to in kind. This wiki-type openness all takes place in real-time, which means it can also double as an IM client since it shows other contributors’ messages as they type it. Add to this support for Gears’ drag-and-drop photos, videos, maps, and other media, which appear in the Wave in real-time, and you’ve got a pretty slick platform communicating – in soooo many different ways.

And it is is a platform as well as a product. Not only can you embed a Wave into any website (so, for example, comments from your website will appear – in real time – on the Wave, too), but Google is going to offer this as a stand-alone, open-source server-side app, complete with developer APIs, enabling companies, groups, individuals or anyone else to run their own Wave site.

So what does this mean in practical terms? Well, you have to see it to understand it fully (watch the video?), but this time Google might really be on to something. Wave takes the best elements of social networks (contact management, social organization and media sharing) and merges it with their online, cloud-based document editing tools, and it turns into what could very well be the model for the successor to email itself.

You can get more info on Google Wave straight from Google, or Mashable has a few good articles outlining Wave features and its potential. They’re even running a contest for the best Google Wave Extension!

Wave is a very clever new platform and we should all be keeping our eye on it as Google gets closer to launch. Who knows – this time next year you might be reading this post on a wavelet, not a WordPress blog!