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Google Wave is the result of a multiyear project bent on integrating e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and possibly social networking. Components of Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook, alongside other internet discussions, can be aggregated in one interface, stream-of-consciousness-style.
Users can create a "wave" by typing a message, or uploading photos and adding contacts to the wave as they see fit. Other contacts can be added later, and those people can add other contacts to the wave unless the original wave starter forbids new entrants. View the I/O developer preview:
Google envisions three types of developer projects using Wave:
To unify conversations on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, blogs, and other social media sites.
To create applications that run within a wave, similar to what developers have done for Facebook.
To enhance an existing workflow within an enterprise.
In a market flooded with similar initiatives, Google is hoping for feedback from developers and is planning to open-source Wave's underlying platform to let developers build on the concept.
Google expects to release Wave to the general public later this year. In the meantime, it released APIs (application programming interfaces) to I/O conference attendees so interested developers can begin experimenting with Wave on their own websites.
Topsy, a service with a similar, more search-oriented premise — providing real-time data to searchers based on relevance, as determined by retweets — launched last week.
