In a somewhat bold move aimed at bringing about a change in how people communicate online, Google intends fusing e-mail, instant messaging, and document collaboration into a new service – Google Wave!

By the way of the rather ambitious project – which was previewed at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco on Thursday - Google expects to eventually substitute some of the most common uses for e-mail.

Talking about the evolution of the Google Wave project in a post to the official Google blog, Lars Rasmussen – Google’s Software Engineering Manager – said that most of the Internet communication by users, by the way of e-mail, live chat, document sharing, was created out of replication of a real-life form, which had resulted in the a kind of fragmentation of the communication.

According to Rasmussen, the Wave service has been designed as a communications system that tries to “take advantage of the computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms.” 

After the free service becomes available to the public some time later this year, Wave’s users would be able to invite others to join their “wave” related to a specific topic, whereby they may follow the thread of messages. All users on the list will be able to see the letter-by-letter typing of messages, which would help speed up the conversation!