Google Wave is a project announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 28, 2009. It is a web application and computing platform designed to bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking, mixed with spellchecker and translator extensions, which are able to work in concert. It is planned to be released later in 2009.

Google announced on the Wave site that the service will feature an open protocol, Google Wave Federation Protocol, which can be used to build a “custom Wave system”. It provides APIs for writing extensions on both the client and server. Google also announced that they plan to release the majority of the source code as open source. Google Wave is created using the Google Web Toolkit.

The official Google blog states some important points regarding Google Wave:

• Google Wave a web application where people will use to access and edit waves. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop.
• Google Wave can also be considered as a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
• The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, so that any Wave service can interact with Google Wave.