As if Google apps weren't useful enough already, a team of their developers have taken the wraps off a new project that will provide a major injection of realtime functionality.

Dubbed Wave, Google is positioning the new app as a kind conversation and collaboration system, a logical evolution of communication akin to the jump from mail to email, telephone to chat, or blogging to microblogging. They describe a wave as "equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

Create a Wave, add people to it, toss in some gadgets, feeds, and photos, and mix with a rich text editor. You'll see new content in near-real time as your friends add it, and you can even hit the rewind button and watch your Wave evolve from scratch. Wave's power will come from its extensibility and ability to integrate with existing activity sources like GMail, Facebook, and Twitter.

Wave is built on HTML5 and the Google Web Toolkit. What's more, the team plans to make the source code powering Wave open source to encourage developer involvement in the project's continued growth and evolution. If you'd like to get involved, head over to the Wave Developer Blog for API information and a look at what you can build with Wave.

[via Official Google Blog ]