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The Tech community is buzzing about a new Google product that is being released to 100,000 users on September 30, called Google Wave.

The reason for all the excitement is that many of us see Google Wave as the technology that can change the way we operate in our day to day business.

A more public version of Wave is expected to be released in the first half of 2010.

I know you are wondering what Google Wave is.

The way it is explained is, think of email if it were invented today rather than decades ago.

Email resembles regular paper mail in that it must travel from one mailbox to the next. It is a discrete message that can have a reply.

In the end, you end up with two documents. Google Wave changes all that because it is in both mail boxes at the same time. Wait a minute, what?

Yes. A Google Wave is a message that is in both inboxes at the same time.

If the recipient replies to your message, you will see the reply as it is being typed.

So... it is kind of like chat. But, it is not chat; because it stays in your inbox.

But, then it is like chat and email because you can invite others to join your wave. So then the message lives in multiple inboxes.

Google Wave also works as a file-sharing service. You can drop a photo or video in your wave, which all the members of your wave can view.

But, let's say you want to share something privately within your Wave to one of the members, you can set permissions.

What is really going to fry your egg is, what if your co-workers kept working on Wave, which is a draft of a proposal, or some such business document, and you lost your place in the conversation? No problem.

Rewind the wave to where you left off and watch the conversation develop. Pretty neat, huh?

So, what does this all mean? What problem does it solve?

Here are my thoughts:

• No more stuffed email boxes with multiple emails about the same topic. One Wave per topic, period.
• Faster collaboration. Google Wave operates like a live document. You can add, delete, format, move, or mark up the document simultaneously and LIVE. No more emailing multiple copies of a document back and forth with innumerable versions. No more wasted time waiting for emails and edits.
• The death of facebook. OK, so this is just my dream. But, if you are hanging out on your Wave doing work all day, chatting, sharing pics and videos, and have a Wave open on the side with your family, why would you Facebook? It would be double the work.
• On a serious note, Google Wave has the promise of changing the workflow of many organizations. It eliminates the need for so many receipt verifications. If you're on the Wave, you got the memo.
• Preserved institutional knowledge. From the first hello, you will be able to view and replay the conversation that led up to a finished product, whether it be a decision, a policy, a book, a report, or anything of that nature. When somebody leaves the company, they will not take that knowledge with them, allowing newcomers to backtrack and understand why things are done the way they are.

I'm crossing my fingers that I'll be one of the first 100,000 people invited to use Google Wave. It would satisfy me until Christmas of next year.

If you have an hour to kill to see all the awesomeness of Google Wave, click here.

Here is Google's post with thelatest information about Wave.