Google recently released a preview of their newest application, Google Wave.  By asking “what would email look like if were invented today?”, they’ve created a unique collaborative space for people to communicate in their own browser — no extra software required.

For example, you can reply to parts of emails (you don’t have to copy/past parts of messages) and you can optionally have IM conversations with a live character-by-character view of what the other person is typing (you don’t have to wait for them to finish typing before you start typing a response).

There’s also functionality that allows for collaboration across installations, meaning that we could have one installation with our accounts, and another university could have theirs, and they’d still communicate as if they were the same. (See video minutes 1:05 to 1:10)

It’s open source, with an API, meaning that software developers have the chance to create interoperable services before its release.

There’s a developer preview underway now, but it will be open to the public later in the year.

Here’s a video of Google’s presentation. The whole video is 1 hour 20 minutes, but you get a sense of a few of the basic features (not necessarily the coolest ones, though) between minutes 8 and 15.  Other video features include its interoperability with Twitter around 57:30, and live translation (while typing!) around 1:10..

[Thanks to Peter for the video link]

• For those of you for whom search can’t be fast enough, here’s Keyboardr, a search mashup that provides the results of your search from Google, Wikipedia, blogs and images, As You Type!  [from ReadWriteWeb]

• Change.gov, Obama’s transition website, was offering an open forum for asking questions, and then allowing people to vote to prioritize which ones should be answered first.   Apparently, they got an overwhelming response and closed it down at midnight, last night.  You can still, however, see the list of all the questions, and how people voted for them, here.  The tool they used to accomplish this is Google Moderator, which is designed for just such a function.

• Unofficial survey: Is anyone using Twitter for work?  Do you find it useful for communicating with patrons, or with staff?  Tame the Web has a post about using Twitter for internal communication in the library.  Post your thoughts in the comments!