Technology.am (May 29, 2009) — Google unveiled an early version of a collaboration and communication tool, Wave for developers, which unites features from e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, multimedia management and document sharing.

Wave has the potential to drive people away from popular Google products like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Picasa, Blogger and Sites, as well as from similar products from competitors like Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.

Google Wave is an open-source version of Gmail constructed via instant messaging. To start a wave, two users start what is essentially an instant-message session, which can be archived as a conversation. Other users can then be invited to join each wave or conversation, and there’s even a “playback” feature to track the process of the conversation.

A tool called “Bloggy” lets you to publish the entire wave, which can itself be updated like a normal wave.

Google will provide APIs so that developers can integrate their own code in to Google Wave. One of the ones demonstrated was with Twitter.

The “Searchy” and “Linky” tools will allow embedded links and real-time search. Google has come up with extensions called robots, which are embedded tools.

Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney is also very impressed with Wave, and said this is one of the best product concepts I’ve seen in the past five years.

It’s clear that Wave represents a significant evolution for Internet communications, particularly e-mail and IM, and Gmail users will in time migrate to Wave, he said.

However, Wave’s appeal extends beyond e-mail and IM, since it also offers a wide variety of other functionality, like blogs, wikis, photo management and document collaboration, and can be extended broadly by third parties thanks to its open architecture and APIs, he said.