Have you ever seen what computers looked like when email was invented some forty years ago? Pretty out there. Well when Lars Rasmussen from the Sydney Google technology office (the team that brought you Google Maps) began the Wave project, he had in mind what email would look like had it just been invented today.

So maybe you’ve seen it in the headlines and heard your friends talking about it, but you have not had the time to actually check it out. Google Wave is a “personal communication and collaboration tool.” Its design is geared towards merging email, instant messaging, wikis and social networking in an all-in-one solution. What it basically ends up looking like is a private multimedia chat room.

The program, written in Java using Open JDK and using the basic Google Web Toolkit, works like email or Usenet, but instead of having all responses to each message stored in personal inboxes, message documents (waves) contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips), stored on a central server. Collaborators are able to use a playback feature in Google Wave to see the order that a particular Wave was edited.

Also a Wave may be embedded, for instance, on someone’s blog, allowing friends and co-workers to collaborate and discuss in real-time.
The system was introduced to the public last March; launched to about 100,000 selected users on September 30, and will probably remain in development until next year. The developers who have been given access by Google, can nominate up to 20 other trial users.

Current featured extensions for Wave are LabPixies, Ribbit, 6rounds, Lonely Planet, AccuWeather and of course Google Maps.
Stay tuned for more.