Google Wave is a Giant Social Noticeboard

Google yesterday unveiled Wave to developers at Google I/O, describing it as what email might look like if it had been invented today, as opposed to in the 1960s. Google’s Wave will combine an Internet browser, instant messaging, wikis, photo sharing, and e-mail.

Google’s aim is that people will use Wave to simplify the way people exchange ideas and information across the web. In a blog post yesterday, developers at Google said there was one big question left unanswered, “What else can Google do with this?” Which in turn made us ask, “You want it to do more?!”

As it stand the whole idea seems really complicated and messy. “You create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly,” explains Wave developer Lars Rasmussen. “It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication,” he continued. “You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”

You might need a moment to digest all that and try and picture what exactly is supposed to be happening inside your browser. It's basically a giant Facebook wall or noticeboard where you and all your friends can look at the same collage of information, photos, links and messages. Leaving aside the fact that Google is looking for suggestions as to how to make this application do more, we’re not exactly feeling the social networking side of Google. First it was asking us to make our own Google profiles and now it’s developing what seems like some kind of monster Twitter. What do you guys make of the idea? Let us know in the comments section below.