What’s Google Wave all about?

Just heard about Google Wave for the first time, so surfed the net and found this “complete guide to Google Wave” over at Mashable. To give you the highlight’s of Google’s new real-time communication platform that will launch to the public later this year here a few facts: .

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, here are just a few:

– Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

– Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

– Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

– Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

– Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

– Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

– Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.

– Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

While these are only a few of the many features of Google Wave, it’s easy to see why people are extremely excited.

Read more over at Mashable or  launch of Google Wave or http://andywibbels.com/2009/05/google-wave-keynote/ or http://wave.google.com/