According to Google, email and instant messaging were both designed in the 1960s, yet haven’t changed much in the last forty years or so.

Until Google Wave.

“Here’s how it works: In Google Wave 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.”

The website details their plans for the product, platform and protocol, and then asks the following question:

“So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else can we do with this?”

So to recap: Here’s our plan. This is the tool. Any idea how we can use it?

There’s a YouTube video that explains the concept, but it’s 90% hype and 10% waffle. But if I filter through the sludge (a good example being when one of the speakers describes how email works), I think I get what the product is, and what it does.

But I still don’t get why we would use it.

We already have email, Instant Messaging, bulletin boards, wikis, voicemail, Twitter, blogs, video/voice conferencing and more. Do we really need another platform?

Are Google fixing something that isn’t broken? Or are they building a nice idea that’ll never really catch on?

If you get to 10 minutes 45 or so of the video, you’ll start wondering why they don’t use the phone, text messaging or video conferencing.

Am I missing something here? Or am I just too old to “get it”?