Google hoping Web surfers will ride its 'Wave'

— -- Google today debuted Wave, a new form of social e-mail that attempts to bring a Facebook type friends and more activity to e-mail.

The free tool runs in a Web browser and combines elements of e-mail, instant messaging, wikis and photo sharing in an effort to make online communication more dynamic. Google hopes Wave simplifies the way people collaborate on projects or exchange opinions about specific topics.

The concept was shown off at a Google conference for developers, and will be available to the public at later in the year. (Go to http://wave.google.com for a preview.)

Created by the brothers who first did Google Maps, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, a "Wave" is equal parts conversation and document, "where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more," wrote Lars Rasmussen on the official Google blog.With this program, a "Wave," is a social e-mail that can feature text, photos and feeds from other sources on the web. Like Google Docs, others can join in and edit the "Wave."

Among other things, Google is counting on outsiders to figure out how to weave Wave into the popular Internet communications service Twitter, social networks like Facebook and existing Web-based e-mail services.

Having learned their lesson from the mapping experience, the Rasmussens wanted to give developers ample time to tinker with their newest creation before unleashing it on the rest of the world.

The Rasmussens broke away from Google's mapping service in 2006 to concentrate on building a service that would enable e-mail and instant messaging to embrace the Web's increasingly social nature. They contend e-mail hasn't changed that much since its invention during the 1960s.

"We started out by saying to ourselves, 'What might e-mail look like if it had been invented today?"' said Lars Rasmussen, who worked on Wave in Australia with his brother and just three other Google employees.

Wave is designed to make it easier to converse over e-mail by providing tools to highlight particular parts of the written conversation. In instant messages, participants can see what everyone else is writing as they type, unless they choose a privacy control. Photos and other online applications known as "widgets" also can be transplanted into the service.