Google has announced a new tool for real-time online collaboration it is developing. Wave is being developed by a team operating in Australia that previously worked on Google Maps.

Mashable has a great introductory article by Ben Parr – Google Wave: A Complete Guide

Parr sums up the essentials of the Wave as follows:

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:

– Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

– Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

– Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

– Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

– Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

– Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

– Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.

– Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

There is some new terminology associated with Google’s Wave that will allow to distinguish the new from what we’re already using.

What will be the implications for P2P? It seems to me that collaboration could be boosted in ways that are difficult to fathom yet. The implications are quite mind boggling. Consider how first email and then social networking changed the way we interact. Google’s Wave will be – well – a whole new … wave. No wonder there’s quite some buzz about this.

On the P2P list, Nathan Cravens commented:

This buzz arrived just as I’ve pieced together a pretty clear general view on how we might go about creating an entirely post-scarcity environment. What timing! Wave is the sort of hyperaggregator that can adapt to what I have in mind–in part expressed below. ‘Wave’ is a useful term to describe “collaberative design” in one word–fab.

Conversations are easier to track in Wave. It is backwards compatible with e-mail, so a conversation in a wave can remain sent as an e-mail. When it becomes a better tool in practice, and folk continue to speak well of it, we may be witnessing here the last of e-mail conversation.

What I’m most interest in is Wave’s ability to port in user generated programs, like software and hardware design ware, and view within the wave–from birth to the very moment–who made changes to a design and how the design changed over time. By viewing a design history, we might find something worked better previously than existing. Photo sharing or collaborative essay writing are simple examples, but I’m more interested in seeing how this tool is used in collaborative infrastructure or systems design itself.

An infrastructure map might begin with the layout of NYCResistor’s hackerspace graphically represented as a floorplan after a wave search for “NYCResistor.” This layout is itself a series of waves, one wave for ‘MakerBot’ another for the ‘Lazor X’, ect. The waves ‘MakerBot’ and ‘X Lazor’ may be generated without knowing about NYCResistor at all, but because NYCResistor uses these tools, the established waves describing the MakerBot and X Lazor are more detailed and adopted with a special wave layer for Resistor’s particular tools. The devices then, based on user preferences, communicate with the wave to report a tool’s activity. Something like that would aid Resistor’s collaberation with our friends at Skynet–I’m all for that.

This program will help encourage collaboration by enabling the place for any variety of app useful to generating a collaberative design. It will encourage competition for reputation by enabling users to observe design progress. The aggregations of these apps into a single program means more potential for the cross pollination mentioned in the NYCResistor example.

and Ryan added:

A cynic could say that corporations will always be untrustworthy and that the cheat will always wait until the most fateful moment. An optimist would say that we are entering a new age of openness and sharing while still recognizing markets and innovation deserve financial recognition where desired. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween.

I, for one, was quite flabbergasted when reading the Mashable piece.

For anyone wanting to get the details from the horse’s mouth, there is a lengthy (80 minutes) video of the presentation to some 4000 developers on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ