Google does it once again!  The same guys (literally) that brought you Google Maps are now bringing you Google Wave.  Google Wave is the ultimate mash-up between e-mail, instant messaging, and bulletin boards.  This will be a great solution for online collaboration.  Some of the more impressive features are multiple users being able to edit a document in real time, real time instant messaging (seeing what someone types as they type it), and a feature called replay.  Replay allows users that are brought into a Wave later on to be able to see a play by play of what happened on the Wave.  Google Wave is going to be a open protocol so anyone can create their own wave client or system.  In the video below they show two web app versions of it and then a command line version as well.  I’m looking forward to this.  While I don’t see this stopping the progress of e-mail, I can definitely see this as a better alternative to the current instant messaging structure that we have.  Here is the entire presentation.  It’s about an hour long but very interesting for developers.