Menlo Park (ip-192.com): Well, your e-mail account could be a thing of past – at least according to Google. The search giant is inviting 100,000 testers to preview its new communications platform called Wave.
Google describes Wave as an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. The program allows people to review and discuss documents in real time, using richly formatted text, photos, videos, and maps. Teams working on a project can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. A playback function lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
Extensions allow making conference calls (Ribbit), share real time video (6 rounds), create an itinerary (lonely planet), check weather conditions around the world (AccuWeather), and check or pinpoint locations on a map (Google map). If discussions get to tight, teams can solve Sudoku puzzles to relax.
For Google, Wave is work in progress. The company hopes that developers will come up with a ton of APIs to extend the functionality of the program. There is no specific timeframe for a public release, but several developers report on blogs that the application has become much more stable over the last couple of months.
[...] Menlo Park (ip-192.com): If you want to ride the Wave, you may have to pay up first. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that some of the 100,000 invites Google send to developers and corporate IT departments to test the new collaboration tool (ip-192.com reported here). [...]