How would the email look like if it was born in this day and age? Brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, founders of Google Maps, set out to answer and found Google Wave –where more than 1 million people (as reported by CNET) are waiting to surf. Google handed out invites to 100,000 users this October to  test its new platform that has left millions yearning to join the party.

Google fans who have not been invited are searching the Internet for an invite. They did find one on Ebay but unlike Google’s philosophy of free lunches this one was priced at 5000 USD. Later the ebay invite was pulled off presumably to avoid any controversy.

Email came into existence some forty years ago by copying the model of snail mail, which is – I send a letter and you reply. Now, with Internet most users have started using it for instant messaging, social networking, sharing files and a lot more. What would be the new face of  email?

Imagine this. You send a proposal to a Strategic Business Unit (SBU) head who is working with you on a website upgrade. After an initial email conversation, you realize you need to consult your web administrator. But you want the web administrator to be party to the numerous discussions you have had with your SBU head. How do you do it efficiently?

Google Wave perhaps has the answer. It is an open source real-time communication and collaboration platform. Instead of sending and receiving emails, you host conversations that are called waves. While email goes to people; participants join or leave a wave. (Check the infographic for details).

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. You can add or remove people from a wave, let them answer inside a message, playback the whole conversation, add photos and videos, set locations using maps, update your blog with the wave and build on it to add as many other applications as you may please. All this in real time. If you were chatting with a person for forty minutes, you were probably sitting idle for at least 12-15 minutes waiting for the person to type. On waves, you can see what people type in real time, without having them press enter or submit to send you the message; so you start formulating the reply even before the person has finished typing.

To assist you in typing, Google Wave has a highly context sensitive spell checker. As shown in the product demo on the Google website, it can differentiate between the words ‘been’ and ‘bean’ depending on the context they are used in.

These waves can be then embedded on your website. You an already visualize virtual round table discussions on waves that can be saved and replayed.

After a discussion, Wave helps participants edit them. Imagine working on a presentation or a concept note together with friends. The corrections made by all of them can be marked and played back. Also, users can share pictures and map data on waves by simply dragging and dropping them in the wave. Though these features will be available once it is launched Google has not yet disclosed what it would to add in the future.

Anil Dash, a blogger and entrepreneur from New York, feels Google Wave could face technology challenges. It could be as basic as developing- a collection of various protocols that need to be mastered to be able to develop for it.

Few bloggers who have used the application also feel that waves get extremely noisy. There is too much going on. Sometimes the system is so fast that it is difficult to keep track. Three people typing together in a wave is as good as three of them speaking at the same time.

But this flipside could be a learning experience for Google. Though email was invented more than 40 years ago, it found its many users only in the last two decades. Is the Wave design engaging enough for people to adopt it faster? At the moment, it looks promising but still needs to be tested. Is it too complex to explain? Yes, it may be difficult to get people to use something so complex. But any technology takes time to settle and get popular.

But the bigger question that we need to answer is: are we looking for an email replacement? Perhaps yes given Google’s commitment to its philosophy of changing the world.