By now you've read the accounts from a couple weeks ago about Google Wave, the experimental, open source collaboration and communications tool that bundles e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing and other tools in one application. Google Wave hijacked the Microsoft Bing announcement when Google announced it at Google I/O May 28.
Lars Rasmussen, the Software Engineering Manager at Google who introduced Wave at Google I/O, wrote:
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. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.
You can then refer back to a Wave to see the whole conversation and document thread. When a Wave is open on two users' screens, messages bounce right off Google's servers into another user's browsers to enable instant messaging-like communication.
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