Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 October 2009 08:34 Wednesday, 30 September 2009 14:18

Long e-mail konversations easily get hard to follow, especially when several participants have replied to all. Having the inbox filled up whith loads of similar answers without structure can also be very annoying. For many people the limitations of traditional e-mail have almost reached a point where it's more of a obstacle to effective communication than a productive tool.

Google have realized the need for an enitrely new way of communication and their proposed solution is Google Wave. Instead of e-mails the flow of communication is handled in a structured stream of comments called a wave. This wave can have many participants and can consist of both instant messaging (like chat) and offline messages (like mail). The idea is rather hard to explain but the actual tool is looking very intuitive and easy to use. The release of Google Wave is still quite a while in the future but just recently Google presented an early pre-release targetting developers. If you can spare one hour and twenty minutes and want to have a sneak peak into how we might communicate in the near future, watch the video below from Google's developer presentation. The target audience is programmers but the idea and the possibilities should be easily graspable for non-programmers as well.

If you're not a developer and thinks that's way to long you could instead view the following 10-minute introduction to Google Wave.

Apart from messageing Google Wave also has a lot of features for document collaboration built in. This will be a huge improvement for groups who needs to create joint documents. Google Wave will be open source and it will be possible for developers to add on features and interaction with other systems. This means that Google Wave most likely will be connected to social networks such as facebook, myspace and flicker. For companies this of course means new promising opportunities of creating interactive communications with customers.