What is Google Wave?

This week, most people were expecting the official announcement of Microsoft's new search engine Bing, but many were surprised that Google made an announcement of their own at Google I/O 2009.

So what is Google Wave?

According to the Google Wave website, "Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves."

The idea for Wave came from two brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, from Sydney, Australia. Jens noted that both email and instant messaging were designed many years ago, and he proposed a new communication model that incorporated many of the new technologies and communication advancements that have been introduced since their creation, such as blogs, wikis, collaborative documents.

Still confused about what exactly Google Wave does? (I know I am.) It seems that Google Wave is a product that you will have to experience firsthand to truly understand. Google has stated that Wave is in its infancy and has not announced a launch date for the public product, but you can sign up for alerts at http://wave.google.com/ or if you are a developer, you can visit the Google Wave Developers Blog to learn how to start working on Google wave.