Google is looking to change the way we use the Internet to communicate with a new service that it calls Google Wave. Wave was previewed Thursday during the Google I/O conference as a way to combine e-mail, chat, photos, feeds from around the Web, and more in a collaborative environment. The project is not only cool-sounding, it's also quite ambitious, and Google hopes it will eventually replace some of our uses for e-mail.

In a post to the Official Google Blog, Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen discussed the evolution of Wave after he and his brother Jens joined Google. According to Rasmussen, too much of our Internet communication was created out of imitation of a real-life form (e-mail, live chat, document sharing), and as a result, it had become too segmented when it didn't have to be. "What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?"

Cue Google Wave, which is "equal parts conversation and document." Invited parties can insert elements (photos, rich text, feeds, anything) or talk about different parts. Because it allows both collaboration and communication, Wave can be used for both quick messages or content that will be used over time. And, if you miss part of what happened with other collaborators on a wave, there's a playback feature so that you can see how something evolved.

Wave is not yet available to the public, though a set of APIs is available to developers—and developers seem to be pretty excited about them. On the newly created Google Wave Developer Blog, Google discusses how the APIs can be used to embed waves into your own site or write your own robots/gadgets that will work within a wave. Wave also makes use of the Google Wave Federation Protocol, allowing developers to create self-hosted instances of Wave that can communicate with each other over an open protocol without depending on Google's servers.

Some believe that Google's openness with its protocols and licensing indicate that the company has major ambitions for Wave to possibly replace e-mail and other traditional communications. Of course, that would depend on Wave gaining sufficient traction upon launch, and not everyone is sure that Google can pull it off on the level the company seems to think it can. For now, however, interested developers can request access to a Wave Sandbox so they can work on projects during the preview phase, and the rest of us can just sit and wait to hear more details when they become available.