Ars takes you inside of Google's bold vision for the future of Internet messaging with this hands-on look at Wave. Learn more about the experimental service, its underlying technology, and the opportunities that will provide for third-party developers.

Many of the underlying standards that define modern e-mail technology were originally developed in the 1980s. Almost 30 years after the birth of SMTP, e-mail is still the dominant Internet communication medium despite its significant limitations and increasingly anachronistic design. Supplementary services like instant messaging and microblogging have emerged to fill in some of the gaps, but virtually no attempts have been made to build a holistic replacement for e-mail. Our most important day-to-day messaging infrastructure remains intractably mired in antiquity.
To advance the current state of Internet communication to the next level, it will take a truly audacious vision and highly sophisticated technology. The engineers at Google seem to have both. At the Google I/O conference earlier this year, the search giant unveiled a new prototype service called Wave, which aims to deliver a unified platform for next-generation messaging. The prototype, which is currently accessible to a limited number of users and is scheduled to open up for broader testing soon, is an intriguing communication tool that also provides compelling insight into the future of the Web.
The scope of Google's Wave project is broad, which makes it difficult to define concisely. It brings together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, collaborative rich document editing, and generic support for third-party Web services in a single seamless communication medium that is more flexible than any of those things individually. On a technical level, it is a messaging platform that consists of a protocol, a Web service, a set of standard extension APIs, and an open-source concurrency framework.
Communication within the Wave service is organized in a structure that is a bit like ad-hoc forum threads. Each top-level conversation contains groups of messages that are sort of like subthreads. The conversations are referred to as “waves” and the subthreads are called “wavelets”. Individual messages, which are called “blips”, are the smallest discrete conversational unit of a wave. The distinction between Wave—the service—and “wave”—the conversational unit—is significant, so keep an eye on the capitalization.
In e-mail terms, a wave is like a group of messages tied to a specific subject line. A wavelet is like a single thread of messages that that are sent as replies to that subject, and a blip is like an individual e-mail. It's important to note that these concepts are not totally analogous, as Wave reflects a distinctly different messaging paradigm and doesn't totally conform with the e-mail model. We will explore some of the differences shortly. When a user starts a wave, they can invite any number of other users to join the discussion. Participants can post individual messages, edit shared content, and insert rich media such as images or Google Map widgets. Wave is designed to facilitate real-time concurrent messaging, meaning that content appears to all users immediately and multiple users can edit and submit content at the same time.
When a user starts typing a message, the individual text characters of the message will appear to other participants as the user is typing. It will eventually be possible to selectively disable real-time transmission for individual blips by enabling a “draft” mode which is not yet available in Google's current prototype.
(Source: Ars technica)