The official Google Australia blog has announced a cool-sounding new project - Google Wave:

Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

It was locally developed in the Sydney Google office! Very cool. There is a developer preview video on the official site which shows off more of what it does. promoted/edited forum post

I was gonna newspost this a bit later; can I just hax your post a little and promote it?

Yeh of course.

Firefly nerds rejoice?

Uhh, Firefly?

They used the term "wave" as a multimedia email type thing. Surely this will mean that Google will fund a renewal of the show so they can steal more stuff from it.

will microsoft retaliate with a version for bing? lol.

To me it just sounds like a fancy chat-room.

by the Sydney-based Google team that created Google Maps, used by millions of people worldwide

Well fuk me, I didnt know the guys in Sydney did that. What champions we have here! Anyway, I guess we'll be seeing the QGL forum turn into a google wave sometime soon then eh!?

And here's the latest from MS with their new search engine Bing.

They used the term "wave" as a multimedia email type thing. Surely this will mean that Google will fund a renewal of the show so they can steal more stuff from it.

Sounds more like google stole the idea from IRC and just added the ability to add pictures & formatting, kind of like a share whiteboard. Now where have I seen a share whiteboard app before? Oh yeah, Windows NetMeeting.

Meh! I could only last 20 mins in..

Surely this will mean that Google will fund a renewal of the show so they can steal more stuff from it.

Fine by me.

we used to have a ShoutBox on bghers.com but it ended up being an insult machine and filled with 95% junk chat.

Watched the lot - seems very promising!

Looks awesome. Kinda like email, IM, wiki & word processor all rolled into one.

No doubt this will be poo-poo-ed by the 'your email inbox is not a document repository!' network admins out there.

If this thing uses smtp and standard mailboxes then its fail.

I think this is a fantastic idea! There are a lot of cool features in there, in particular the replay feature imo. It's nice that they're finally creating a communication device that is based on online communication instead of telephone/post etc.

If this thing uses smtp and standard mailboxes then its fail.

It doesn't, it's a brand new protocol which will be open source.

Yeah this is exactly what Sol Trulijo was talking about when he said Google was their competitor, back when he first came on board.

This is aimed squarely at Telcos - They flourish (and flounder) because they can cap a price on both ends of a specific, directed mode of communication. The SMS. Voice. QoS for email; business grade services. This surely pushes the Telco way down into the 'dumb pipe' category, which reduces their capacity to identify and consequently charge on services. Google will not just be competing against Outlook, The local Telco will be in the fight also. Low level might be 'dumb', but, it's pretty effective.

More power to em!

I also liked how they self-congratulated themselves for implementing ytalk in java! (well GWT)

Awesome app tho, is very sharp.