So, what’s all this Waving business all about and should you care? Well Wave is Google’s new communication project that is somewhat difficult to describe, but is based around an amalgamation of IM, email and real-time collaboration services. It’s currently in a closed beta, recently expanded to 100,000 testers (all invited manually if we’re to believe the buzz) and may revolutionise the way we communicate with our friends, co-workers and family across the internet.

I’ve got MSN/Yahoo/AOL/Gtalk IM already, and email, why would I want something else? Well imagine a webapp that you can login to from anywhere with a browser, that gave you collaborative blend of IM and email with a load of sharing features all in a tidy and unique package. That’s what Google’s aiming for with Wave. It’s something that you’ll have to see to really understand but one of its stand out features is the instant character broadcast. That is, the text you type instantly appears in the Wave for everyone to see the moment your finger hits the key. Now in my mind this will lead to a load of typos, but if we gloss over that, we could have collaborative conversations where you can interpret what people are saying, editing it in real-time and even finish their sentences for them. Replies can be started in a separate message, but you can also reply to someone’s sentence right in that sentence meaning you no longer have any ambiguity to who or what you might be replying to. The Wave also represents a persistent message a bit like email, meaning you can invite people or send them the Wave at a later date. They’ll get all the conversation and edits and be able to play it back blow by blow with the replay feature.  This means for instance, if you’ve got a conversation about a busted piece of equipment that needs fixing between two colleagues that is up for debate, they can talk it all out with costs and alternatives in a Wave. Once they’ve come to a conclusion of how to proceed, they can then send the whole Wave to their boss who can see all the information but doesn’t need to haggle over the details to sign off on. It’ll be a lot cleaner and much more efficient than sending a chain of emails, especially if more than one or two people are replying, something that makes a complete mess of emails.

Waves are more than collaborative IM sessions though. You can directly embed media in them via simple drag and drop. Photos, YouTube videos and Google Docs can all be directly embedded within the Wave for watching, editing, reading or viewing. Examples given by Google for real world use of Wave could be checking of a contract, reviewing the document and pulling bits of text out into Waves for collaborative editing. Now I can see myself editing journal articles and joint project write-ups like this, so for students it could be incredibly useful for all the group projects everyone seems to have to go through. Another stand out feature that might be incredibly useful, if it works as described, are the use of Wave extensions, one of which was real-time (can you see a trend here?) translation. Imagine talking to a friend in Brazil in Portuguese, just by typing in English. Now I must admit that machine translation has never been particularly accurate, but it should be sufficient for your friend to work out what you’re saying. Language barrier be damned, we will converse about that sick YouTube video, even if we don’t speak the same language.

The beauty of Google Wave however has to be in the code, and forgive me if this is boring to some of you, but it’s mostly written in HTML5. This means that without a major effort, it should work on any up-to-date browser on any platform on any device with feature parity. The obvious implementation is the mobile platforms. Google is right on this and as of the developer preview a working iPhone webapp complete with pretty home screen icon was working, with one exception editing. It’s something that’s not supported directly in HTML5 but is also something that could change by the time the webapp hits the wider world.

So will Wave succeed? I find it hard to believe it won’t, it is Google after all. Will it be useful? Undoubtedly it will be useful for anyone who wants to collaboratively edit something, and so for students/project workers I think it could be a really useful tool. Will it replace everything else? No, and I think that’s where the hype out-reaches the promise of the product. With a load of social networking sites, IM networks and good old email pretty entrenched, Google Wave is not going to roll in and wash all else out. Should you be excited? Well I’m intrigued and I think you should check it out as soon as you can, which may not be for a good while, but it’s not going to be earth shattering when it lands.

With permission, this article first appeared in Felix, London