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. Read the rest of this entry »

For those avid Gmail users, if you haven’t noticed the significant recent upgrades to Gmail, then you’re truly missing out. To name a few, Gmail now supports IMAP, got new Emoticon styles, added Group Chat support, created Colored Label tabs, made a new Contacts Manager, and most recently added support for internal AIM Chat.

With IMAP, external email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or applications found on portable devices like the iPhone or a cell phone can communicate with your mail much more effectively. Rather than simply storing email from POP connections as Gmail did in the past, IMAP syncs allow much more functionality. For instance, if you read a mail in your client engine with IMAP, your Google account will be smart enough to know this and mark the mail as read, rather than keeping hundreds of exported, unread mail. Of course, there are many more advantages of IMAP that one can find out by reading this Wiki article: Internet Message Access Protocol [Wikipedia]
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