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As far too few people know, Google Maps started life here in Australia, and Google continue to have a large Australian engineering presence. Now, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, two of the founders of what became Google Maps have announced Google Wave – built here in Australia by all indications.

What exactly is Google Wave? Well, from the description, it sounds like a kind of real time collaboration wiki kind of thing. Or maybe a kind of distributed, extensible Facebook? Hmmmm. From the announcement

You create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved

Some cool things – it’s built with HTML5 (will Wave do for HTML5 what Google Maps and Gmail did for Ajax?), and it’s a platform that can be extended by developers.

It’s only announced as and not even in any kind of public availability, but well worth keeping an eye on, and great to see such high profile stuff being built right here!