Google Reinvents Email, Documents with "Google Wave"

What would email look like if it were invented today, rather than several years ago? Meet Google Wave, a preview application shown off Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.The Google Wave site is now up and running, although access to the application will be restricted. Google Wave was developed by the Google Maps team, led by Lars Rasmussen, and assisted by his brother Jens. "One of the best times of my life was in 2005, just after the launch of Google Maps, when developers started doing crazy things with the APIs," Rasmussen said, who added that he hopes developers will do the same with Wave.What is Google Wave? Think of an open-source version of Gmail constructed via instant messaging. To start a wave, two users start what is essentially an instant-message session, which can be archived as a conversation. Other users can then be invited to join each wave or conversation, and there's even a "playback" feature to track the process of the conversation. Google also said it intends Wave to also be a platform as well as a protocol, with the appropriate tools and extensions for each.In fact, it might not even be accurate to call it a reinvention of email. Google executives tied the instant-message/email model to real-time document collaboration, even search, and extended it to the Web and to blogs.