I checked out the Google Wave preview that was offered up at Google I/O 2009 and I was impressed. The demo itself was an hour and twenty minutes long, and when you watch it, you know they were doing some rather clever and special things, but it is more powerful to think about what they are building in the context of your digital life.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Wave is, it is a Google Wave is “a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”. Another one?! Yep, it is another one, but I appreciated their take on communication and collaboration. The go to market strategy for this innovation will be the key to its success, because I believe it is dependent upon proliferation to be successful – i.e. you and I both need to have one to unleash its true power.

Let me come back to the ‘powerful to thing about what they are building, in the context of your day’ comment – above. And here, the little things matter. I believe the Wave team managed to answer the following challenges -

1. Don’t you hate it when you get an email, or a post on Facebook and someone rattles off a bunch of questions and you can only reply to one of them? Or you can’t split the conversation so that you can insert your answers at the end of each question they asked?
2. Doesn’t it both you to get added to a group conversation (on email) late, and you need to decipher the context of the content?
3. Don’t you wish you can combine your IM and email clients into one solution? And more over, take the content that you might have just collaborated on and spit it out into a document or blog?
4. How about contextual spell checker so that you don’t get suggestions for spelling correction that have nothing to do with the content you are authoring?
5. Wouldn’t it be cool if you can convert a conversation or document into a Blog and then see and respond to the responses to the blog from one interface? And do so for all the external ‘publications’ that you might have?
6. What about collating pictures that five different friends might have captured from the same event into a single album?

And these are just some of the day-to-day things that they thought about. The technology itself is pretty darn cool – like the fact that multiple users can edit the same content at the same time, and they call see what’s happening in real-time, while the system also manages history, tracks changes and mergers these changes. Oh… and you can do this on a mobile device!

See how Google Wave might answer some of the small (and big) experience challenges in your digital life… (I promise Google didn’t pay me to say that – I just appreciate technology with purpose!)