Enterprise Nation

By the end of the year you will almost certainly be wondering how you managed to communicate online without Google Wave. So says Alex Johnson as he surfs his way through this new application.

What to expect

Not yet launched, it has already caused a tidal, er, wave of interest among social media specialists and a few lucky folk have already been give the chance to play with what is essentially a collaborative communication tool that you operate within your browser. This means that it brings together all your email and web chat applications, allowing you to drag attachments - and music - into an online chat and make it instantly available to whoever you're 'talking' to (you'll be able to see them too in your contacts section). You will also be able to edit messages as you would a wiki.

Google believe this will help business colleagues in particular work more efficiently, and by implication those who work from home should benefit even more from this file-sharing potential.

There'll also be an option to add a chatroom-type element to your web site or blog for real-time conversations, making it more like IM than email.

Reading through what some of the Masters of the Internet have said in their previews, some of the functions sound a bit complicated - and the above is only the briefest of brief runthroughs of its potential - but apparently it's not as tricky as it first appears. You can, indeed should, have a bit of a look for yourself at the Google Wave Preview site.

• Google Wave