Google is trumpeting another revolution: Google Wave, a new online communication tool. This video makes Google Wave look pretty good — the best of email, Facebook, online collaboration, SMS, etc., all rolled into one user-friendly package. But Wave is still in development, and we’ll have to wait and see if it turns out to be the real thing, or just another clunky dead-end.

Even if Google Wave turns out to be crap, I will say we are overdue for some kind of improved communication tool. Here in the Palo Alto church, we do a fair amount of online collaboration and communication, and we’d be hard-pressed to function without it. Non-profit organizations have to make increasingly efficient use of staff time and volunteer time (and I think the Great Recession has accelerated this process), but the tools we currently have available to us feel clunky. Email is essential, but we all know how awkward email can be. Google Docs and other online collaboration tools work well, but they are very limited. Texting works for me, but the only people who text are people my age or younger, and texting does not easily lend itself to conversations involving multiple people. Blogging is another great tool, for those of us who read and/or write blogs. Most of all, I do think it would be nice to have something that integrated all these disparate communication tools, and the real genius of Google Wave might be the idea of having all these different communication tools integrated into one place.

Update 4 August 2010: Google has announced it will no longer continue to support Wave. This comes not long after Facebook passed half a billion users.