Google recently unveiled it's latest product - Google wave. (It won't actually be released until later this year) Google hopes this product will "revolutionize online communication." From the CNN.com article - The Web application from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called a "hosted conversation," or a "wave."

It sounds pretty exciting. One shiny feature will be the ability to post to your blog with an email. I know, I know. Most blogging sites already offer that feature and some even let you post to your blog with a text message from your phone. However, with Wave, you can also edit blog posts from within the same email.

They'll also give the ability to edit/reply/comment on certain sections of an email - or a 'wave' as they call it. This feature is much like Microsoft Outlook, but it's something that hasn't been available in GMail. And, if someone joins a conversation late, they can actually replay the conversation to see how it progressed. And, if you want to forward a wave to someone else, but you don't want them to see the comments from other people, you can hide those comments without the need to go through the wave and delete the comments "manually."

Another shiny feature is live/shared updating. And, not only live updating of waves - way cool - but live updating of documents (they demo'ed live updates of a Word document). So, instead of creating a draft of a document, sending it to your boss and waiting for him to hack it up and send it back, you can both edit the document in real time.

And yet another feature will be the ability to post to an online community such as Orkut - another Google app, which I'm switching to instead of Facebook. And, that same live/shared updating will be available there as well. Granted, since Wave is open source, I'm sure someone will come up with a gadget/API/plug-in/whatever to interface with Facebook.