Google Wave is a project in development previewed and demoed for the first time on 28th May 2009 at Google I/O conference. It’s basically the discussion API we have been talking about with Pekka. The web GUI is implemented with GWT, it stores conversations/shared documents or “Waves” on a server and provides collaborative real-time editing and commenting to those. Plus it’s an open protocol for transmitting those Waves accross different Wave server implementations.

The whole code will be made open source and extendable both at server side (“robots” may act as machine participants in “Waves”) and client side (gadgets will provide extended user interaction).

The demo is long (1:20h), but quite well prepared with realistic usage scenarios, check it out: Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009