Google Inc. previewed a new communications service that combines features of email, instant-messaging and document-sharing to facilitate multiperson conversations online.
The Google Wave service caps a years-long project to come up with a way to break down the barriers between different types of online communication services, said Lars Rasmussen, the Google engineer who led the development of the service along with his brother, Jens Rasmussen.
The service, which won't be open to the public for several months, will allow users to start a conversation, called a "wave," and to invite their contacts to join it. Any member of the wave can put photos, notes or other content into the group, which updates in near-real time.
People see an "in-box" with the most recent waves they have joined and whether others have added any new notes or content to them. They can click to scroll through the wave and see what content has been added to it.
Dozens of Internet companies, including Facebook Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are racing to come up with new methods for sharing and organizing online information.
Google, which announced the new service at its developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday, envisions Wave as not only a way to share messages with friends and colleagues, but also to share and access a variety of information online. For instance, a user could create a wave that is an article he or she wrote and then invite people to read and comment on it.
Mr. Rasmussen said it is too early to tell how consumers will use Wave, but he expects that the various applications and services Google hopes developers will build on top of it will be a big draw. Videogame developers could build a game that began as a wave, for example, and Google will allow other Web sites to embed waves into their Web sites.
He added that Google hasn't thought much about how the service could generate revenue. "One of the great luxuries of Google is that we get to not think about that yet," he said.
(the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124353647910863557.html)
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