Google Wave: the wave of the future?

I just heard about Google Wave on my Twitter account. Google announced a new, open source platform called Google Wave. It is a combination of a lot of different communication applications presented in real time. Basically, you can communicate with anyone in real time and add pictures, video, etc., by dragging and dropping onto the "wave". Anyone can reply, edit, or collaborate live on the wave. There is also a rewind feature that will allow users to see the entire conversation. Some other features include a spell check and a translator. A few other interesting features are that anyone can be a wave provider and waves can be embedded into a website. And a few more:

"- Debuggy: A robot that responds with debugging information about each event on a wave

- Stocky: Automatically detects stock quotes and provides real-time stock information

- Bloggy: Pushes wave content to a blog

- Maps: Allows for collaboration on a Google map to plan events

- Bidder: You can turn a Wave into your own eBay

- Ratings: All Wave participants can rate and review items - then it will show you a tally of the results."

(source: http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/twave/)

Other than its search engine, obviously, some of Google's other products have not been as popular in the United States. How many of you have used Google Video (they dropped that and bought YouTube instead), or Orkut (Google's Facebook, very popular in Brazil), or Knol (sort of like Squidoo or Hub Pages) or Jaiku (Google's answer to Twitter)? Wave seems to be a combination of all of these things all at once. If you'd like to see more information or sign up to be updated about Google Wave go to wave.google.com or waveprotocol.org. Depending on how easy it is to use, Google Wave may just be the future of the Internet.

Of course, we'll have to wait and see since it doesn't come out for a few months yet. It seems that some of the features like the drag and drop may not be supported in all browsers (apparently you have to have Google Gears -- surprise, surprise). So even when it does come out, Google Wave may take a while to catch on with the public. One thing Wave does seem to have going for it is the jargon. There are waves (the whole recorded conversation including documents, etc.) and wavelets (a smaller subset of waves) and blips (an even smaller unit of the conversation). So now, instead of being Tweeple twittering and tweeting, we can all be Wavers waving and blipping.