Tuesday, Jun 2, 2009    Text size: 

They're calling it Wave, and it's essentially a thermonuclear webmail application, but that only grazes the basics of the tech giant's latest efforts to invent the future.

Here's how it works: A user logs into their Google Wave account and pulls up a list of their contacts, which most likely come from their Gmail or Google contacts. The user can then start a "wave" with any number of their contacts by clicking and dragging contacts into the wave.

The wave starts out looking roughly like an email, but any of the participants in the wave can rich content to the communication, including (for now): photos, videos, polls, maps, games and party invites.

Wave can work like email or an instant message. Users can add to a wave in anticipation of another user eventually seeing it, but if two users are logged into Wave at the same time, they can communicate on the wave in real time.

The wave also is dynamic, providing real-time updates to users. In addition, a latecomer to a long-developed Wave can hit the rewind button and replay the Wave to see how the conversation got started and developed over time.

Google officials said that one of their developers first got the idea for Wave back in 2004. The company put the project on the back-burner until 2007, and they stress that Wave is still very much in its infancy.

"Google isn’t just thinking of Wave as another web app that it creates and you use on one site — it wants you to be able to use it across all sites on the web," tech pundit MG Siegler wrote for TechCrunch.com. "Say, for example, you have a blog. As a post, you could share a wave with the public and allow others to see what you and the other people in your wave are doing. And these visitors to your blog could even join in as well right from your blog, and all the information would be placed right into the original Wave."

Google also plans to make Wave an open-source project, offering up its code to developers and even competitors. Company representatives said they hope that other versions of their product will pop up all over the web and change how people communicate online.

They may already have some competition. Last September, open-source web giant Mozilla unveiled a new browser plugin called Ubiquity that adds a single field to the Firefox browser that accepts simple commands.

For example, someone writing an email to a friend about a dinner date may want to add a map. The user can activate Ubiquity with a keyboard shortcut and type in a command like "map this restaurant." Ubiquity will then show a Google map, which the user can instantly insert into the email.

For more information on Wave, visit Google's information page on it. To download Ubiquity, visit Mozilla.com.