Google has given developers a preview of a communications
technology calledGoogle Wavethat promises to replace e-mail.
"A 'wave' is equal parts conversation and document, where people
can communicate and work together with richly formatted text,
photos, videos, maps, and more," said Lars Rasmussen, software
engineering manager at Google.
Google unveiled its online communications environment at its
IO 2009 conference
in San Francisco.
Google Wave is designed to take advantage of all the different
forms of digital communication and advances in computers and
networks since e-mail and instant messaging were introduced,
Rasmussen said in a
blog posting.
The prototype, unveiled yesterday, is aimed at eliminating
divisions between different types of communication and using the
latest computing power to bring them all together in a single
environment.
"Users 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," said Rasmussen.
Google has posted examples of how services like
Twitter
can be automatically included in waves.
Rasmussen described it as "concurrent rich-text editing", where
users see nearly instantly what collaborators are typing in your
wave as well as being able to use "playback" to rewind the wave to
see how it evolved.
Google has invited developers to take part in the
open source project in the coming months, but gave no specific
date for a public launch of the service.
"Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we are inviting
developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public
launch," said Rasmussen.