Google Waves Hello

Google has been working on yet another collaboration tool - Google Wave. Promising to offer 'real time communication and collaboration' is google wave a competitor to MS services like sharepoint and outlook or something altogether new?

Well, to answer this question, I've been doing some research on the service and found the following:

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

The system looks very flexible and there are already some really interesting extensions including shared google maps, video chat, telephone conference calls, sales team collaboration, wikis and even sudoku. The code for google wave is open source, so you can build your own extensions.

After a bit of research, it looks like google wave is something of a cross between facebook type social networking app, but with more powerful tools to allow external developers to create advanced web based applications.

So in a years time, will we all be waving to each other? (well it certainly sounds a lot less painful than poking) Time will tell. I think that the extensions will be the key to winning people over.

I've applied for an invitation to preview the product and will post my experiences here if my application is successful.

Here's the keynote speech where google wave was announced at Google I/O 2009: