Google have announced a new web application that’s under development called Wave. It’s being developed by the same two brothers who developed the Google Maps application and promises to revolutionise the way we communicate over the Internet with an open-source policy.

For a detailed look there’s a video of the developer preview from the announcement last night in San Francisco and an interview with the founding team.

The two most popular methods for Internet communication are based on principles adopted from pre-Internet communication. Email replaced the posted letter and instant messaging replaced phone calls. New methods of communication have began to appear on the Internet though, such as blogs, twitter and wikis — better suited to the medium. Google Wave wants to begin using these communication methods and hopes to replace email and instant messaging — at least from what I can tell so far, without actually using it.

Microsoft have been exploring this area already with Office Sharepoint and Communication Server. It will be interesting to see how these two companies implement their solutions and how they sit together