Google is set to stand communications on its head. Again.
The soon to be released Google Wave program, web app, platform, protocol, paradigm is introducing a new way to do email, IM, forums, wikis, social networking and blogs. All-in-one. And not to put too fine a point on it, it looks pretty slick.
Not only do they have an awesome webclient to ship, but we’ll be able to integrate all that functionality into our own websites and programs using their API.
But wait! You won’t have to rely on Google’s servers: they’re making all this stuff open source, so you can host your own version of the Wave.
Here’s the demo from Google IO 2009 developer conference (1h 20min):
There’s also a very good analysis of the technology at TechCrunch.
Awesome sauce.