Google unveiled its Wave online collaboration tool at the Google I/O developer conference this week.

The firm said that Wave could be used for both personal communication and work projects, and showed in a video demonstration how the tool could be used to share richly formatted text, photos, videos and maps.

According to Google, Wave was designed with one simple thought in mind: what would email look like if it was invented now?

Wave works as a central point for communications, so rather than emailing each other, users email into the Wave. As a new entrant arrives they see a new message and respond to it, as with an email. However, should both be online then the instant messaging tool comes live.

Here the demonstrators showed off a new feature. Instead of displaying an ' ... is typing' message, Wave displays text as it is being written, giving recipients more time to prepare their responses to messages as they build on the screen. Users can opt out of this feature.

As each new entrant arrives they are able to play back messages to date, effectively catching up without having to trawl through multiple emails and conversations.

One very interesting feature is the ability to select parts of an email to respond to. Rather than the traditional method of reading through an email and then using your own to respond, clicking on an element of an email brings up the option to break it into points and reply to each in order. Although demonstrated as a means of ribbing the presenters about what time they get up in the morning, this obviously has strong benefits for business discussions and other work email threads.

Other business-focused features include content control and media sharing tools. When participants are working on a document a note is made of who edited what, and as each change is made the author is automatically notified. Attachments, such as photos, need only be dragged and dropped from the desktop into the Wave to become a part of any presentation. A spell checker is included as standard.

The demonstrators used the Safari, Firefox and Chrome browsers when running the Wave application.