Silver Square

Remember how this time last year Twitter was barely a blip on the radar? Maybe you hadn’t even heard of it, yet. Seemingly overnight it exploded out from under a blanket of obscurity into the mainstream media. A tsunami of buzz is coming in the next few months about Google Wave, and it’s going to be picking up steam even faster than Twitter did. It has the backing of a major player like Google and the technology is more revolutionary.

So what is Google Wave? At the core it’s a replacement for email. It’s hard to imagine email will completely disappear, but the early evidence suggests that Wave does everything email can do… but better. Features include…

• Real time typing. Imagine if every email you sent could operate like a chat room or instant messaging window
• Someone getting added to the conversation 20 messages in, can watch a playback of each message as it was added in sequence
• Drag-and-drop attachments (from your desktop) right into the conversation
• Built-in translation so you can be communicating with people in different languages
• Conversations can be embedded in a website (and you can keep reading and writing right on the page)

On top of all that, Google is making this an open source project. That means third-party developers can create extensions and addons to increase Wave’s functionality. (Third-party development played a huge role in Twitter’s explosive growth this year.)

Need to know more? If you have the time, the Wave developers will run you through an 80-minute demo.