Edition6: What is Google wave

What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in realtime.
Organizing events : Keep a single copy of ideas, suggested itinerary, menu and RSVPs, rather than using many different tools. Use gadgets to add weather, maps and more to the event.
Group Projects : Collaboratively work in real time to draft content, discuss and solicit feedback all in one place rather than sending email attachments and creating multiple copies that get out of sync.
Photo Sharing : Drag and drop photos from your desktop into a wave. Share with others. Use the slideshow viewer. Everyone on the wave can add their photos, too. It is easy to make a group photo album in Google Wave
Meeting Notes : Prepare a meeting agenda together, share the burden of taking notes and record decisions so you all leave on the same page. Team members can follow the minutes in real time, or review the history using Playback.
Brainstorming : Bring lots of people into a wave to brainstorm - live concurrent editing makes the quantity of ideas grow quickly! It is easy to add rich content like videos, images, URLs or even links to other waves. Discuss and then work together to distill down to the good ideas.
Interactive Games : Add a gadget to a wave to play live interactive games with your friends (we're hooked on Sudoku!). See everyone's moves as they make them in a fast-paced game or take a break and come back later.
Google Wave is designed as a new Internet communications platform. It is written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Google Wave works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multi-media messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added to or removed from the wave at any point during a wave's existence.
Waves, described by Google as "equal parts conversation and document", are hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications.[5] Any participant of a wave can reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave, and add participants at any point in the process. Each edit/reply is a blip and users can reply to individual blips within waves. Recipients are notified of changes/replies in all waves in which they are active and, upon opening a wave, may review those changes in chronological order. In addition, waves are live. All replies/edits are visible in real-time, letter by letter, as they are typed by the other collaborators. Multiple participants may edit a single wave simultaneously in Google Wave. Thus, waves can function not only as e-mails and threaded conversations but also as an instant messaging service when many participants are online at the same time. A wave may repeatedly shift roles between e-mail and instant messaging depending on the number of users editing it concurrently. The ability to show messages as they are typed can be disabled, similar to conventional instant messaging.
The ability to modify a wave at any location lets users create collaborative documents, edited in a manner akin to wikis. Waves can easily link to other waves. It is in many respects a more advanced forum.
The history of each wave is stored within it. Collaborators may use a playback feature in Google Wave to observe the order in which a wave was edited, blips that were added, and who was responsible for what in the wave. The history may also be searched by a user to view and/or modify specific changes, such as specific kinds of changes or messages from a single user.
As of November, 2009, Google Wave is still in active development and is expected to remain in development until later in 2009. It was launched to about 100,000 users on September
30, 2009. Google Wave access can be requested. Developers have been given access to Wave proper, and all wave users invited by Google can nominate up to 20 others.