What is Google Wave?

The Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool. Google Wave uses an open protocol, so anyone can build their own wave system. Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool. According to Google Wave developers, “the Wave can make you more productive even when you're having fun.

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 real-time.

According to Google, “This is just the beginning. To help potential wave providers get started, our plan is to release an open source, production-quality, reference implementation of the Google Wave client and server, as well as provide an open federation endpoint by the time users start getting access.”

The wave protocol is open to contributions by the broader community with the goal to continue to improve how we share information, together. If you're interested in getting involved, here are a few things you should check out on www.waveprotocol.org: 

Draft Protocol Specification -- This is an early draft and will definitely change

Community Principles -- Understand how this open source project works

Architecture Whitepapers -- Learn more about the components of Google Wave

Google wants to hear from you. You can drop a note on the technical engineering forum with your feedback. Beyond the federation protocol, you may also be interested in learning more about the Google Wave APIs, as described on the new Google Wave Developers blog.