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Reading Slashdot I came across this article on Googles latest yet-to-be-released product called, Google Wave.

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/22/220226/Google-Wave-Reviewed

I was interested enough to sit through the 1 hour video demo on the product and it was worth every minute. I am thoroughly ecstatic about this product and the Google Wave API makes the possibilities endless. Think about all those iphone style apps or all those great FireFox Addons rolled into an enterprise (or something great for you and some friends) collaboration suite.

In thinking about Wave, Google thought about what they would include in email if they could completely rewrite it today. What they ended up doing is making email interactive like an instant messenger client, to the point where you can see what recipients (yes thats plural you can add multiple people to an email) is typing character by character as it happens real time. Now say you add a new person to a “thread” that has hundreds of responses, enter the playback feature. You can playback the life cycle of the thread, message-by-message and edit-by-edit from beginning to the most recent response. This thing is jam packed with other neat features like a slick drag and drop photo gallery (gears only right now but they are pushing to get it adopted into HTML 5), spell checker, setting pieces of a thread private etc.

The whole thing is open source so you’re not locked into Google as your Wave vendor. You can install it at home or work and modify the code to tailor the Wave to your organizations needs. If modifying the application is a bit much you can tie into the Wave API and create your own extensions. If you have an hour and twenty minutes to kill I would watch the demo, it really is awesome!