Google unveiled one of its most ambitious products ever at its I/O conference this week in San Francisco. Google Wave appears to re-invent email in a unique assemblage of communication technology: instant messaging, online forums, wiki, social networking and photo sharing.

Google says the new tool exhibits what is possible within a Web-browser using the latest HTML codes. Conversation between two or more people are called "waves" in which users can drop photos, Facebook type applications and maps, among other things. The wave becomes a recording of a richly detailed conversation or project. Among the features that amazed conference attendees, Google showed how it can translate text on the fly. It even has its own lingo, which helps to illustrate what exactly Google Wave is.

A team of engineers from Google's Sydney, Australia offices have been working on Google Wave for the last two years and gave a presentation this week in San Francisco, a video of which is available at Google Wave's Web site: http://wave.google.com. The Google Wave team was led by the same engineers who created Google Maps.

The new tool will be launched later in the year, but a beta version is being released to a limited number of users.

-Daniel DeBolt