Looking forward to having a play with this new communications platform from Google. Even at beta stage, it’s already massively hyped as the rival to Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and possibly also Webex in the business community.

Put very simply, the platform is a type of live chatroom with a facility to share/amend/display documents to participants in real time.

A more comprehensive explanation of how it can be used can be found here (though you might be better off just waiting to have a play when it comes out, as it feels almost too big to be able to describe in less than 1,000 words, or even in an hour-long video for that matter.).

The most interesting aspect of this for me is that before we even manage to get a grip on the basic features of Wave, the platform will have almost undoubtedly evolved considerably with supporting third-party developer apps, due to Google’s open-source strategy, and an ambition to weave it into all sorts of different places on the Web.

I imagine it won’t be too long before I’m submitting my first Wave link on this blog…but perhaps only after taking a short course in how to use it: Google’s ambition is as impressive as ever, but hopefully they have also dedicated as much energy to the usability as they have to the long list of innovative features.