Webmonkey
Google has set out to rewire the e-mail inbox with a new product called Wave. Wave is a web-based application that marries multiple forms of communication and collaboration, including chat, mail and wikis, into a unified interface. Everything inside Wave happens in real time: You can even see a comment being made as the person is typing it, character-by-character. Google Wave, which was demonstrated Thursday at the Google I/O developer conference taking place here, is now live as a private developer preview. Conference attendees can start playing with it now, and Google has its eye on a public beta launch within a few months. It’s a peculiar model we haven’t seen before, sort of a “chat inside e-mail” approach that has the potential to profoundly alter the way we share information and collaborate with one another.