Google is releasing a new html 5 application called Google Wave later this year. It could change the way we interact in online social networking, communication, and marketing.

What does all of this mean for us? Essentially, Google is trying to combine email, instant messaging, documents, collaborative communication, rich media, and much more in a Wave. Email as though it were invented today! Unlike when it was invented before the internet.

Google Wave is a self-described equal parts conversation and document in which people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and even more. The Wave can be shared with a few or many users with the ability to reply or post to questions or topics in the middle of the document or to another person. Waves allow for instant communication between users. Google Wave also supports a rich set of open API’s that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and build their own extensions to work inside of Wave’s. In other words, start a Wave conversation on your site.

Google Wave may even change the way we interact with one another on the web through current services like twitter, flickr, email, and blogging—as a platform we use to interact with those services. This also means new ways and avenues to market brands.

One tool already in the works, for brands to take advantage of, is a useful customer service tool called salesforce.com. It allows a customer to ask a question and a useful robot pulls information down regarding the question. If the customer does not find the information useful, they have the option of being able to chat with a representative to solve the problem. Because of the capabilities of the Wave, their conversation could remain open for days, based on the consumers urgency to respond.

Google has over 146 million users worldwide which could easily turn into Wave users. Spreading Waves nearly overnight. How fast and how powerful will this tool be? Only time—and the community backing it-will tell how deep this will change our online experiences.