Lucid Digital Media

Here's a quote from the Google wave press release:

'Here's how it works: 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. That means 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" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.'

So there you have it, Google have gone and re-invented the internet again, just when we were all getting used to how it used to work!  But seriously, what does this mean for the average user, are we all going to we 'waving' at each other in the next couple of years instead of sending IM's and emails?

The answer is: quite possibly.  What google are trying to do here is create a new genre of internet messeging / communications.  They are trying to roll all the good things about Instant Messaging, Email, Blogs, Wikis and feeds into one coherent and consistent communications medium that you access and manipulate through the web (we're guessing specifically the web browser).

Because its Google you can bet your bottom dollar there is going to be an advertising angle to it somewhere.  It seems Google are trying to create a new niche that they can guide and develop.  The end product will be open source with well documented protocols and their own client will serve as a reference for anyone else who wants to develop their own Wave clients.

Google are currently soliciting for help from the open source community to help finish the product's feature-set and drive adoption and innovative use.  If they carry on chipping away like they have been then there is no reason why we wont see some very interesting things come out of Google Wave... it could end up being the Google Maps of Instant Messaging.