If you are tired of the rigid structure of email, or the fact that email and instant messaging aren’t better integrated, then Google Wave might be for you. Google released a preview version of its latest tool this past October. There was much anticipation around Wave, which developers promised would revolutionize the way we communicate and collaborate. Google capitalized on this anticipation by limiting who would be allowed to use Wave; upon making the preview available, they sent out a limited batch of invitations and each invitee could ask 10 friends to join. Those ten friends were not given additional invites, so there was a limited number of invites available.

There was such a frenzy around getting invites that some people put theirs up for sale on eBay. I was lucky enough to get an invite through Bob Morse, local Internet guru and owner of Morse Media.

The system is more of a ripple than a wave unless you have contacts on it (imagine trying out email without having anyone to send a message to), so it was nice when Google recently distributed more invitations. I got to invite 20 people.

What is Google Wave and why is there such excitement about it? The inventors, who were part of the team that created Google Maps, say Wave is what email would be like if it were developed today rather than 40 years ago. It is a combination of email, instant messaging and a wiki capability. When you start a Wave, you choose from your contact list who will be part of the Wave with you.

Once you type up a blip, as Google calls the messages, if your contacts are online they can reply immediately. If they are offline, they will see the blip waiting for them the next time they log in as if it were an email, except that the latest content is highlighted so you can easily find it.

If your contacts are online when you start a wave, you can watch them type their responses in real time. This is how it is similar to instant messaging. Unlike instant messaging, your content does not appear in chronological order unless you choose it to. For example, if you’ve had a conversation where you talked about walking your dogs then shared ideas on a work project, with normal instant messaging if you had a follow-up comment about walking your dogs, it would appear completely out of context because those texts show up chronologically. With Google Wave, you can pinpoint the exact text you’re commenting on and have your response appear there.

The other nice part about Wave is that it eliminates confusion when several people are involved in an online conversation. With email, each recipient of a message has their own copy. So if three users click Reply All, it’s up to the recipient of these messages to integrate all three responses. Wave blips on the other hand, are stored centrally so that all recipients receive and comment on the same centrally-stored copy. If you want to understand the order in which a wave occurred, Google provides a playback feature, that shows every text entered in the order it was typed and by whom.

You can also use the system, which provides what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing tools, to collaborate on documents. You can style the text as headings, search and insert web addresses from an integrated Google search feature, or highlight text to make comments on it. Once the document is complete, it is very easy to cut and paste into Word or some other Word processing tool without losing the formatting. Users can insert pictures, diagrams, polls, and Google maps in addition to text.

In addition, there are gadgets and more tools coming in the near future. Google has videos online of users contributing to a blog directly through Google Wave and of users who speak different languages using a real-time translation robot to communicate with each other. If you use iGoogle, you know how many gadgets are available, from weather monitoring to dictionaries to money exchange rates. Once Google Wave is officially released, we will likely see many more Wave-friendly gadgets become available.

The downside of trying out Google Wave while it is in the preview stage is that some things aren’t working. For example, users should be able to drag and drop pictures right into the Wave so that contacts can flip through pictures and integrate their own. This feature does not currently work along with a few other promised features.

I have a handful of invites to give out, so if Google Wave sounds interesting to you, dariat [at] suddenlink [dot] net" target="_blank">send me an email and I will send you one, supply permitting. Priority will be given to kmembers of the Redwood Technology Consortium (www.redwoodtech.org) See you on Wave.

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Daria Topousis telecommutes to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and serves on the Board of Directors of the Redwood Technology Consortium.

Copyright 2009, Eureka Times-Standard Newspaper. The print editon of this article first appeared in the 12/10/09 edition of the Times Standard.