Are You Ready To Catch the Product ‘Wave’ From Google?

Forgive me for writing a post that’s a little off-topic today, but I’m excited.  Google has announced a new product: Google Wave.  Wave is an online collaboration tool a la Basecamp, MS Groove, etc.  However, Google is pushing their product much farther by developing Wave to be a real-time communication tool for personal or business use.

Wave will allow you to create a Wave (think of it as a wide-open discussion or project) and invite individuals to the Wave as you see fit.  Email, text, pictures and videos can be traded real-time and “concurrency control technology” will allow multiple users to edit the same files at the same time.

Billed as “the e-mail of the future,” Google Wave is the result of a multiyear project inside of Google to reinvent the inbox, blending e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and perhaps, with input from developers, connections to the world of social networking.

Personally, I see this as a fantastic alternative to tools like Basecamp or Groove (both of which require a monthly fee or software purchase, and with Groove, there’s no guarantee that your clients, vendors, etc. will have the software!).  And if the early speculation about social media integration is true, that makes Wave even more appealing.

Photo courtesy of wave.google.com

The announcement merely states that Wave will be released later this year.  So who knows how long we have to wait.  Either way, I’ve already requested to be a part of the BETA launch (though I didn’t write a Haiku).  And I look forward to putting Wave to use both for my business and my personal communication!