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Google Wave unveiled at Google I/O conference.

The newborn Google Wave is a unified Web application: Imagine email, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and Flickr mashed together on your email screen in realtime -- no reloading, it will all change letter by letter as you watch. At the moment, it's just "a developer prototype," but Google promises a public version by the end of the year.

Facebook is as much of a moated castle as AOL was, but more accessible because you don't have to download software, it's browser-based. All social networking apps offer to scrape your email to invite your friends; each makes you set up a new profile.

Wave would let you host your own personal Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, all based on the most basic and first use of the Internet, exchanging a message to another address -- it's email on steroids.

Since Facebook and Twitter can't make any money, the more popular they are the faster they'll go bankrupt: Hosting all those growing gazillions of messages takes ever-larger and more servers.

Wave is open source -- they'll share the code -- and Google plans to "federate" these popular functions and let anyone host her own Wave server.

By calling it a whiteboard, Google slides Wave below the radar of many of us. Meeting tools are a snooze: Online business Toolkit.

Its first app would be an introvert's nightmare even if it weren't updating in realtime:

Larger

Missing for me -- as with all the closed circles of social networking -- is the thrill of discovery, the wild, wild, Web, replaced by the banal clutter of "friends' " telegrams about their whereabouts at all times. If you enlarge the screenshot above, the lives depicted do not resemble my email inbox at all. But this is phone culture, life in 140 characters. Shelley powers calls it "ADD heroin": What is Shorter than 140 characters?

Later: After thinking about Wave while gardening, I published another perspective on this technology: Google Wave, part 2: After gardening, I want more intuitive networking from 'social' technology

Read up:
Google Wave: A Complete Guide. Mashable boils it down

Google Wave - interwebs idealism in real-time "It's not a product. It's a user happiness pill." Register.

Google won't run all the Wave servers. CNet.

Is Google Wave a Twitter Killer?. PC World.

Shelley Powers points to O"Reilly books publisher Tim O"Reilly's Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?