Last week a colleague sent a link to the upcoming Google Wave, a developer preview at Google I/O 2009. So, what is Google Wave? and why am I so excited now for the release?

An overview of Google Wave

I want to summarise some of the features in the video in which Google demonstrated Wave to many developers. The summary and view will, of course, be from my viewpoint and from how envision using it.

A few quick notes on Google Wave, which already seems an interesting system. For some details, watch the developer preview presentation and related whitepapers, linked below.

A wave can be seen as a conversation which lives on a server (like forums, rather than emails). It is modeled as a tree of messages, where a reply can be inserted between any two paragraphs. The editor offers rich formatting and spell checking (based on statistical language model). Parts of the conversation can be restricted to a sub-set of participants (private replies).