Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference, on 27 May 2009. It is a web based service and computing platform designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.

It is expected to be released later in 2009. The name was inspired by the Firefly television series in which a Wave is an electronic communication (often consisting of a video call or video message). During the developer preview, a number of references were made to the series such as Lars Rasmussen replying to a message with "shiny", a word commonly used in the series to mean cool/good, and the crash message of Wave being a popular quote from the series "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!".

Google Wave is designed as the "next generation" of Internet communication. Instead of sending a message and its entire thread of previous messages or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, objects known as "waves" contain a complete thread of multimedia messages (blips) and are located on a central server. Waves are shared and collaborators can be added or removed at any point during a wave's existence.

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