The internet is buzzing today with the unveiling of Google Wave, a “new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”, or more immediately understandable as “email on crack”. As is always the way at Google, they’ve re-expressed a problem with communication as we use it today: the fact that the two largest forms of online communication, email and IM, are based around the letter and the telephone, outdated offline architectures.

Google aim to “combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication” in what could be the next step forward in digital interaction, and a step closer to the workplace of the future. For the last 10 years, we’ve had many worshiping at the altar of “the end of the office”, with Signal vs Noise being one of it’s fiercest disciples. But it’s never really seemed possible: for example, we’re recruiting someone at the moment whose job role will take place primarily online, but logistics dictate that they’ll need to be in the office for things like client meetings. But if such meetings begin taking place through Wave (an entirely probable proposition, just look at the uptake of Skype in corporate culture) then we could be recruiting from a much larger field.

And what of that perennial agency problem of a colleague joining onto a campaign that’s already half way through? Wave has a nifty little feature where a user added to a “wave” can quickly watch how it’s grown into a current state, tracking what discussions were had, changes were made, and get an understanding on the gestation of an idea, rather than just dealing with a single execution made near the end of the line.

We’re very excited about how this could change the way we work …