Google is in final stages to launch Google Wave and it could become the next exciting thing. Google Wave will be about many online applications in one tool. Google Wave will consolidate features like e-mail, photo sharing, video sharing, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, document sharing, maps and multimedia management. Wave could be the most ambitious project that Google has ever undertaken. Wave has been in the works for about two years now and is almost ready to be rolled out later this year.

What is Wave? Wave lets people create a document where you can converse or communicate with people you like with videos, photos and more in richly formatted text. Wave is a unified web application for communication and content creation. In other words it is another social networking product. You can share Wave and any one you are sharing with can reply, edit the content or add participants at any point. You can specify the people with whom you want to share a comment a photo or a video. And then you can playback to see who said what and when and how the document evolved. All this happens in real time and Wave is live. With Facebook one drawback is that whatever you share goes to everybody you are friends with. For example there could be a particular photo you do not want to share with everyone, Wave will help you share content only with people you choose. A Wave can be a simple text message, a collection of photos, a video or other content. Each Wave could be a new Facebook page created in a jiffy with the content you want to share with a specific set of people. And then you can chat in real time.

The best thing of Wave is its API, which can be incorporated or embedded into any website. You can develop API extensions, or simply use the extensions to plug in to your own website like a wordpress plugin.

Google is banking on Wave in a big way. Wave could make people go away from the other Google products like Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Picasa, and Sites and from similar products by other competitors. The possibilities of using Wave are endless so it all depends on how much the end user understands Wave. In the end if it does not turn out to be useful or is not user friendly it will fall flat.

My take is that Wave will indeed create waves. It will be big. Google is really taking on the world.

If you want to know when Wave will be ready then sign up for Google Wave

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