Last night, Google's Seth Covitz gave an excellent presentation on Google Wave to the Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group. With Google Wave, people can send messages, share information and collaborate on projects. Think of it as a combination of email, instant messaging and information sharing.

A Wave can be thought of as a conversation. While a group of people are chatting online, some people might have side conversations. It can be very annoying if people have side conversations in a meeting room, but online asides can speed up decision-making and help groups resolve issues quickly.

Besides sending messages to and from people, there are also robots. Robots are little programs that do things automatically. Seth showed us some examples. Bloggy is a robot that publishes a wave to a blog site. Tweety sends information to and receives information from Twitter. At the moment, the demos are only open to developers that get a Google Sandbox account (for which there is a waiting list) where they can test out new Google Wave code. Fortunately for those at the meeting last night Google offered sandbox accounts to those who had not yet received them.

The Google Technology User Group is not part of Google, but Google provides space and food for their meetings which are held the first Wednesday of the month at Google. Pre-registration is advised as events fill up days in advance and you need to pass Google Security.

Logo courtesy Google Technology User Group.