"[email] was invented more than 40 years ago before the Internet, before the web, and it was done without the experience of things like SMS, and instant messaging, and blogs, and wikis, and bulletin boards, and discussion groups, and social networks, and media sharing sites, and collaborative editors, and all these different kinds of communication that we take for granted today... when we started this project, we asked ourselves the question, what might email look like if it was invented today? ... [Wave] is our attempt."
-Lars Rasmussen, Google Software Engineering Manager
With that said, Wave really is whatever you want it to be. While email is a message passing between individuals, a wave is a shared resource to which users contribute.
There are so many applications, whether you're collaboratively taking notes in meetings, using advanced email or IM, you have a reason to use Google Wave. While it's difficult to hammer down how Google Wave will be used until it is released later in 2009, it definitely is a paradigm shift in how users will communicate and collaborate.
One thing is for certain - Google has definitely merged instant messaging and email (they've created a system where text is displayed as it is typed, to reduce the amount of time people spend just waiting for messages) to form a whole new communication form with Wave. Suddenly, instant messaging isn't as "instant".
The wave is Google's response to the Facebook "share" function and Twitter's @reply. Let's see how developers use Wave as an open-source protocol to develop applications.
Here's the 10 minute abridged version:
or, if you're interested, the full 1 hour 20 minute version:
