Rasmussen and his brother Jens, the other Wave project co-founder, also learned how beneficial it can be to a Google product to have an enthusiastic community of developers around it. They arrived at Google in 2004 when Google bought their mapping startup Where 2 Tech, and went to work in creating what would become Google Maps, a service credited with igniting the mashup frenzy.

At its core, Wave lets people create a document to which multiple users can add rich text, multimedia, gadget applications and feeds, and do so concurrently in the way in which people interact on, say, instant messaging. These "waves" can be rolled back to view the evolution of the document.

It remains to be seen whether Wave will cannibalize Gmail and other popular Google products, but the culture of innovation at the company trumps those types of concerns.

"Just because we have a suite of very popular products, we shouldn't stop innovating; quite the contrary. We should always keep trying and do new, better things," Rasmussen said.

is built on Google Web Toolkit using HTML 5, the latest version of the Web's markup language, and has a set of designed to let developers extend its functionality and integrate it with other Web services. The underneath Wave is designed for "open federation" so that the product is interoperable, and Google plans to launch the Wave code as open source.