Google wave

What is a wave?


"A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time. "
                                                                    ---http://wave.google.com/about.html
I think google wave have some magic advantages:
When you type, people can see what you type, not like MSN, you can only wait and see "someone is typing". Especially, when a group people type, you can see a lot of cursons moving. One wave can consist of several wavelets, like this:

You can insert any content in any where. Usually, you can only reply a article under the content. But in google waver, you can immediately insert you comment after any sentence. When editting a document colabratively, the advantage would be more obvious.

The funnest part of google wave is you can work with a group people you liked. You can invite people participating in you wave through drag his/her name to your wave window.

Now, google wave's function is limited. People can use it only if they are invited. So, they may face the embarrassing thing that there is no one in participants blank. In this situation, they can search the topic wave and apply for joining.

I think it is really a good communication tool for group discussion no matter for daily life or academic.