Google Wave: What lies beneath?‏

Recently, Google has started dropping out 100,000 invites to Google Wave, "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced back on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, which will merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki and social networking. It also provides robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages and numerous other extensions.

User can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss daily routine or share files. Currently, Google Wave is available in a developer preview for sandbox access. According to sources, the Wave platform is designed as the next generation of Internet communication.

However, Wave would not run well on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which is the most widely used web browser as Wave uses the newest HTML standard, which has not yet been incorporated into Microsoft's browser. But, IE users can install Google Chrome 'frame' to use Wave. Meanwhile, it runs fine on Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome.

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

'    Wiki functionality: Anything uploaded on the site can be edited by anyone else as all the information within the platform is shared. Hence, user can correct, append, update information, or add your own remarks within a developing conversation. Any participant of Wave can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process.

'    Real-time and cross-platform functionality: The site is very fast, you can see while someone else is typing, character-by-character on your PC. Also, the drag and drop facility of Wave facilitates users to embed their content to any blog or website.

'    Applications and Extensions: You can build your own apps within waves just like a Facebook or an iGoogle gadget. The new applications could be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

'    Open source: Google plans to release most of the source code as open source, allowing the public to develop its features through extensions. The search engine will also allow third-parties to build their own Wave services quickly so that it can replace the e-mail protocol with the Wave protocol.

'    Playback: Google Wave stores its history so that teammates may use a playback feature which is recently edited, added and who was responsible for what in the wave. Further, the history may be searched by user to view and modify specific changes.

'    Auto-correct: It has autocorrect feature where your spelling or translation is done by the application in 40 different languages.

'    File sharing: The application do not requires any attachments to be loaded. User has to just drag their file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access to the file.

'    Featured extensions: The new platform features various extensions like Labpixies, Ribbit, 6.rounds, lonely planet, AccuWeather and Google maps. These extensions support various games, puzzles, interactive modules etc.

What's next for Google Wave?

Invites are going to developers, customers and other people who registered for an early glance. Various sources are abuzz, sending their reactions, from 'no big deal' to 'Facebook killer''out across Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Recently, developers have been given access to Wave proper and all wave users invited by Google can invite upto 8 others.