Google Wave Will Be More Like a Tsunami

Google's many development teams have given us some great stuff through the years. Google Search, Blogger, Gmail, and their recent acquisition of YouTube are just some of the highlights of how this tech powerhouse in Mountain View, CA drives us to increase the potential of what we can do with the internet.
Hold on to your hats, because later this year Google is going to release to the masses a communications platform so dynamic and powerful that some people are already throwing around the term "e-mail killer."
I'm talking about Google Wave. It's a first-of-its-kind internet communication protocol that will allow you to communicate with friends, co-workers, family or anyone in a more advanced way than e-mail or even instant messaging can support. In fact, this new platform is sort of what you'd get if you mixed e-mail, instant messaging and microblogging (like Twitter) and served them up in a bulletin board/chat room.
You can use it to share photos or videos with friends, and everyone is able to respond in near-instantaneous real-time with replies,comments, tagging, etc...all at the same time. Co-workers can collaborate on projects the same way; everyone has a hand in creating and revising the project moment-by-moment, with the ability to see every step of the developing project, who made which changes, and have multiple conversations about it.
In short, this is going to be revolutionary in much the same way that cell phones, e-mail or instant messaging were when they first became popular with the general public. Not many of us saw much of a use for those beforehand, and now we don't want to do without them because they changed the way we communicate.
The best part of this is that it isn't proprietary. Google is not sitting on this protocol. From the beginning of their development of Google Wave back in late 2007/early 2008, they've designed it to be Open Source. This will allow other companies (like Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Mozilla, etc) to create a Wave service or client and develop plug-ins and applications for it.
It's still in development currently, meaning that average users won't see it for several months. Meanwhile, if you want to know more, hit the highlighted link a few paragraphs back...or watch Google Wave Developer Preview over at YouTube. It's 1 hour, 20 minutes in length, so if you don't have time now, just bookmark it for later. Also, don't let the title scare you away...it was recorded at Google's Developer conference for tech geeks, but there's plenty of simple explanation for the rest of us.