In case you haven’t heard of Google Wave yet, it’s Google attempt to create “what email would be if it was built today“.

Waves (Google Wave messages / documents) are fully collaborative in that participants can edit any part of the Wave, see others’ changes in real-time as they are made, and play back past changes to see how the Wave has grown over time.

This video does a pretty good job of explaining the basic idea behind Google Wave:

According to Google, a wave is:

Equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.

Shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Additionally, waves feature:

Real-time collaboration. Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time.

Natural language tools. Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction.

Extendability. You can embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets, thanks to the Google Wave APIs.

Playback. Users can playback any part of a wave to see changes in the order that they occurred.

Drag-and-Drop File Sharing. To upload a file to a wave, simply drag it from your desktop and drop it inside the wave (requires Google Gears).

Applications and Extensions. Developers can build their own apps within waves.

Open Source Code. The Google Wave code will be open source to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

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A more in-depth description as well as several screenshots can be found in Geekology’s review of Google Wave, here.

Invite giveaway

Google Wave is currently in a limited invite-only preview (just like Gmail when it was released), but Geekology has 10 invites to give away to its readers. To stand a chance of winning one simply follow these instructions:

  1. Follow Geekology on Twitter
  2. Leave a comment on this post with your Twitter username
  3. Tweet the following status update: “Geekology.co.za is giving away #google #wave invites: http://geekology.co.za/gwi (via @willemvzyl). Pls RT.“

Winners will be selected randomly on Friday, the 6th of November 2009 and notified via Direct Message on Twitter.

Good luck!

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