Google's engineers for the last 2 years have been working on a new collaboration tool to combine email, browsing and social networking, IM, wikis and other items into one application. Called Google Wave, the engineers recently shown what they plan on doing.

Its actually really cool. The emails are hosted live on a serer and shared. Emails can be responded in IM format in real time per l-e-t-t-e-r typed.

Thay also added a feature called PLAYBACK, that allows someone to view the history of message replies, so a newcomer to a message is not confused as to what is going on.

It also allows for private replies.

Attachments are drag and drop. They are also instantaneously sent via im. Polls are live as well.

Alot of it allows for immediate Blogging, as well as allows for search within the collaboration, instead of having to open a new search window.

What impressed me was the machine translator at the end. You can speak with someone in another language in real time typing.