Everyone's getting excited about Google Wave: It's going to change the web (in some ways).  Step aside the three other great events of September (Bestival festival, twestival, and importantly my birthday), Wave is coming on the 30th.  Version Choo choo has just been released, and soon we'll all be able to access the real-time communication giant.  'Giant' is only a prediction, but with the massive number of developers involved in the beta-product and the number of people excited about its release, it'd be tough for it to flop.

Everything on the system works in real-time: character by character you can see what people are typing in email, chat and most features.  It's a bit of a wiki, and you can edit and correct information (which will most likely bring out the inner geek in everyone as they retentively edit facts to within an inch of their lives).

It's like a wiki-ichat-file-sending-forum-thread-share-this-one-your-blog-individual-messaging-group-chat machine and once released it will continue to be open source (more open source actually!) in attempts to innovate.

Much like Twitter it's also bringing its own silly language.  On Friday I had a silly-sounding conversation: "I tweeted it. Oh, you aren't going to Twestival are you?" and realised that to the less digital twitter geeks around me, I sounded like a complete prat.  Now Google wave is going to introduce Wave, Wavelets, Blips, Documents (hey, we've heard of them already!), Gadgets, Robots, and Embedded Waves.  Does 'Wave' sound more official and less silly?  A little.  After all that Twitter beating, don't worry Google wave incorporates Twitter - it's called Twave.  I suspect there's no way of making a Twitter-related word sound sensible.

With all the exaggerated hype around whether the dominant search engine will survive the new search facilities from Facebook and Twitter, this is pretty damn good development.  Unrivaled?  Not bad play Google.