As a regular user of Google and its features, we really felt excited about Google Wave. This is what the Google Team says about Google Wave – “A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games or discuss a recent news.

“In Google Wave a wave can be created and people are added to it. Everyone on the 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. 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” option to rewind the wave to see how it had evolved.”

First generation email/IM integration lets a person see when someone was online, and opt to instant message someone rather than send them an email. Wave simply erases this distinction.

If both people are online at the same time, a wave acts just like an instant message – just that a person can see each character as it is typed. The creators of Wave feel that a lot of time in IM is spent waiting for the other person to press ‘Done’. (However, it is also possible for you to set Wave to hold your messages till you are done typing.)

Google’s focus is on reducing the latency of online actions thereby bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world face-to-face communicationWhen a person is talking with someone, he may know what the other person is trying to say even before they finish their sentence. He can respond, or even finish their sentence for them. This is the case with Wave.

The real-time connectedness of Wave is truly impressive. You can drop a few photos on to a wave and the thumbnails appear on the receiver’s computer even before the photos are completely uploaded.

So this indeed would help us a lot in improving the quality of our online interactions. If you are interested you can have a look at some screenshots of the service and you can also get a bit of info about the API that could be used to extend the service and the Wave protocol that allows anyone to run a “wave” server. Google promises that Google Wave will be available later this year.

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