With the dominance of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn on the internet and popularity of Orkut coming down day by day, Google needs to be really innovative on the communication and social networking front. R&D team at Google is putting their efforts to come up with a product “Google Wave” which may be a hit because of its great features and applications. Google Wave is an online portal for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be a conversation or a document where people can discuss and work together, using richly formatted text, videos, photos, maps, and more on the web. Google Wave includes web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol and it is designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions.

Some key technologies used in Google Wave are ::

• Real-time collaboration: Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time.Natural language tools: server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction.
• Extending Google Wave: Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets, thanks to Google Wave APIs

Google Wave merges email, instant messaging, wiki and social networking.