Imagine that your emailing, blogging, media sharing, planning, project managing, discussing, socializing, and all communications actions could compressed and optimally organized together in one tool. That tool, my friends, is the upcoming Google Wave [See Video Below].

With the announcement of Google Wave at this year’s 2009 Google I/O, we are as excited as ever for the amazing work that Google repeatedly displays. From one point of view, it’s hard to even figure out where to begin talking about Google Wave, seeing that it literally revolutionizes the way we communicate online by changing our old digital snail mail methods to something that one would expect if Email was reinvented in the 21st century – oh wait… Google Wave DID REINVENT the Email system.

So exactly how is Google Wave so revolutionary? Will for starters, rather than having a traditional email system that basically emulates snail mail except through the Internet, all communications in Google Wave exists on a so called “Wave.” This Wave is basically one (1) and only one instance of data that lives either on the Google Wave server (similar to how your Gmail mails are also hosted on Google’s servers) but can be accessed and edited by different participants of a that Wave. This way, people can communicate in real time and any edits, comments, messages, remarks, inserts, uploads, links, etc that a participant of a Wave makes, everyone else of that Wave with eligibility will also see, instantaneously. Sounds confusing? You should be, seeing that, once again, Google Wave is changing everything about the way we communicate.

Just speaking of the surface of this new platform, there are many new features and functions of Google Wave. For instance, rather than your traditional email with a Reply or Forward mode to carry on a message or conversations, Google Wave offers messaging with a different perspective. Anyone of a single Wave can edit the message and text anywhere he or she desires, whether it’s at the end of a Wave message, like in the case of a Email reply, or it’s directly in the middle of a Wave. The good news is that all this commenting and editing is stored in one Google Wave to prevent syncing problems with multiple instances of Waves.

However, there are a gazillion more features. So to make this simpler, I have found a set of summarizations of the different features of Google Wave graciously explained by Gina Trapani of [Lifehacker]:

Inline Replies
First the simple stuff. Google says Wave is what email would be if it were invented today, so it looks a whole lot like Gmail. But all editing and commenting happen on a single copy of a given wave (that is, message or document). You can comment on a wave below it, or inline. Check it out.

As-You-Type Live Updates Over the Internet Between Users
Thanks to the new HTML 5 standard and some client-server magic Wave has going on, you can watch your recipient live-type a response in your browser across the internet, much like instant messaging. (If that gives you the creeps, you’ll have the option to disable live as-you-type updating.)

Wave Revision Playback
When you add someone to a Wave after it’s been chopped up, commented on, and edited by others, that person can see the evolution of that wave using the super-cool playback feature. Imagine watching Wikipedia page revisions happen in sequence. Here’s a taste of playback in Wave.

Private Replies
Like a group email you forward to an individual person to have a “private” conversation, you can restrict access to a sub-Wave to certain people.

Embed Waves into Web Pages
Bloggers will go nuts for this: you can embed waves in web pages and collect replies and edits to those waves in your Wave client, as well as on the page itself.

Live Collaboration on a Single Wave
Several people can edit a wave at the same time and watch one another’s cursors dance across the page as it happens.

Live-Updating Search Results
Keyword search results live-update as others type, too.

Contextual Spellcheck
This was the ultimate OMGPONIES! moment for me in the Wave demo. Using a natural language model, Google Wave’s spellchecker makes smart corrections based on the context of your word. For example, Google Wave auto-corrects the sentence “Icland is an icland” to “Iceland is an island.” (Guess all those billions of web pages can really come in handy.)

Google Wave explained by its developers at the 2009 Google I/O:
Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009