In a move to replace traditional email, Google has given developers a preview of a communications technology called Google Wave.

Lars Rasmussen, software engineering manager at Google said, "A 'wave' is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more."

The new technology is designed to take advantage of all the different forms of digital communication and advances in computers and networks since email and instant messaging were introduced. Google claim that the prototype, unveiled at the end of May, is aimed at eliminating divisions between different types of communication and using the latest computing power to bring them all together in a single environment.

Rasmussen adds, "Users create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text,  photos, gadgets and even feeds from other sources on the web." Examples, such as how services like Twitter can be automatically included in waves, have been posted on line. Rasmussen described it as 'concurrent rich-text editing', where users see nearly instantly what collaborators are typing in your wave as well as being able to use 'playback' to rewind the wave to see how it evolved.

Google has invited developers to take part in an open source project in the coming months, where they are being called on to add 'all kinds of cool stuff' before the public launch. No specific date for a launch has been released, as yet.