Last week, Google surprised the I/O conference crowd with their announcement of its very own communication and collaboration tool with an almost-perfect application that achieved the company's goal to 'wow' everyone.

And wow it did as the impressive engineers employed by Google presented the beauty of the newly-developed Google Wave; the technology that is best described as e-mail for the 21st Century. How?

Google Wave is a collaboration of all available internet communication.

Communication including email, instant messaging, blogging, sharing of files, tasks, etc. The Google Wave is where people can work on shared files, enabling a participant to reply anywhere within the message, edit the content and add further participants at any point during the process. Then with 'playback', an absent participant is able to rewind the wave to see who said what and when. And this is all in real time!

Best of all, Google Wave is 'open source'. Every enthusiastic developer can contribute to develop extensions which will continue to improve the tool.