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In today’s fast-paced world, new Internet features are able to change the way we communicate and interact in new and unpredictable ways.

A decade ago, people were just getting the hang of e-mail, while chat messenger and blogs were still a mystery to many. These days, e-mail, chat and search engines combined on the same page are passe. As are social networking Web sites. MySpace and Friendster became popular about five years ago, making it easy for users to create their own colorful personal profile pages. Then Facebook swept onto the scene with a multitude of rapidly evolving features that allowed people to chat, send messages, share photos, post updates and information about themselves and more.

In the last year, micro-blogging Web site Twitter has captured the world’s attention, thanks to celebrities, politicians and news services such as Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama and CNN jumping aboard the site.

So what’s next, you ask. What new ways of communicating can someone come up with now? Enter Dr. Wave. He’s the mad scientist, with messy hair and a white suit, mixing bubbling, colorful liquids in steaming beakers, featured on Google’s official video to introduce and explain its latest project, Google Wave.

Google Wave can be understood as a combination of chat, social networking and collaboration. Think real-time communication, like live chat, but with added features that allow you to share conversations, photos and documents on a one-window thread called Wave. There is no profile page to check out, except for a small pop-up window that provides basic information like name, e-mail address and Web site.

Every post on Wave appears in the form of a speech bubble, which is like a Wiki page in that you and other people in the conversation can add and edit the content. Google Wave records every thread, just like your e-mail saves every incoming message, and there is also a “playback” feature that lets you track changes, seeing who added and changed what.

Google Wave provides options to browse, upload and download the Waves, which is useful if you want to grab the contents for later use. If you no longer want to follow a Wave, there is an “unfollow” button. Every Wave is a neat preview of the topic, because it instantly shows the entire discussion.

Google Wave has the potential to be extremely useful in a professional context because it is a good way to arrange a meeting digitally, to record meeting minutes and to brainstorm ideas.

Taking the opposite approach to Twitter’s very public real-time posts and Facebook’s changing attitudes toward private and public information, every thread on Google Wave is completely private. It is shared only between the initiator and people who are specifically invited into the conversation, either by the initiator or by the other participants.

Let’s say, for example, you want to share your holiday photos with friends. You can just upload them on a Wave and invite whichever of your Wave friends you want to view the pictures. There is no need to create lists or change your privacy settings to prevent everything from instantly going public, like on Facebook.

Google Wave is still in its early preview mode, and is not yet open to the public — new users can join by invitation only. Although it is too early to predict whether Google Wave will change the way people communicate, some of its features have a lot of potential. However, one problem for many Internet users will be that in its current form, Google Wave requires a broadband connection to run. The longer the thread gets, the more time is needed to upload it.

Nevertheless, the hype has begun. And, hopefully, after Facebook has pushed the need to share personal information to the extreme, and Twitter has made everyone anxious to know what is happening every second of the day, Google Wave will push users to begin creating things together.