Google Wave was released to a select number of individuals on September 30th, and the buzz is overflowing. But what exactly is Google Wave, you ask? It’s something new, and it’s out to change the way we think and use email as we know it today.

Google Wave is a real-time communication and collaboration platform on the web. It’s an amalgamation of email, wikis, chat, social media, social networking and project management. It contains email, documents, images, videos, maps and more.Think of it as social email.

A few of the major features of Google Wave include:

• It’s real-time. You can see what others are typing as they type.
• It’s open source. Any code developer can add to the innovations.
• It’s on the move. You can embed a wave in your blog or website.
• It’s like a wiki. Anyone can edit any other person’s contributions.
• It’s playback, playback, playback. Anything can be played again, so that you don’t miss a beat of the conversation.

The bottom line is that Google Wave is for communication and collaboration. Think of any group or team environment, and you can probably imagine how Google Wave could be used to enhance planning, project management and getting things done. Think teams at work, or the local PTA or customer support. There’s really no limit.

There have been a wealth of articles and resources posted online in the past few days to help you understand Google Wave more clearly and make better use of the technology.

Want to know all about it? Want to know how it’s different and why it matters?

To that end, check out the list of resources below, all to help you leverage Google Wave for your business and your personal life. That is, as soon as you can get your hands on it. As mentioned, Google released the application to a select number of individuals for beta testing, and because it works better when multiple people in a group share information and data within the environment Google allowed those users to invite others to join. Look for Google to open access to Google Wave to everyone in the future. Stay tuned!

For now, enjoy the Google Wave resources below:

Google Wave Resources

• Google Wave Home Page
• About Google Wave (Google)
• Request an Invitation from Google
• Google Wave Screens and Video
• Google Wave Developer Blog
• How To: Get Started with Google Wave
• Mashable’s Google Wave Guide
• Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web
• Google Wave Starts Rolling: Picks Up Over 100,000 New Riders
• Will Google’s Wave Replace Email – And Facebook

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Check out our latest blog posts on StartupNation.com, a site devoted to helping entrepreneurs, startups and small business owners build business and achieve success.

Our four latest posts are as follows:

Going Beyond the Website Conversion to Measure Success
Look beyond a single website conversion event to measure success. Aim at maximizing lifetime value to generate higher returns for your business.

23 Google Tools for Your Website
Check out these 23 resources from Google to increase the performance of and to promote your website.

5 Killer B2B Digital Strategies
Who says business-to-business companies cannot leverage the digital channel to fuel growth? Learn five important B2B digital strategies.

Improve Website Navigation & Improve Your Conversion Rates
By improving your website’s navigational structure, you are sure to increase your conversion rates and generate more results from your website.

Next up on StartupNation will be Website Marketing NOW’s Landing Page Tips series, starting today. Be sure to check out the series and generate more leads, orders and sales from your Landing Pages!

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As a small business owner or marketer, you want to be assured that your website is free of technical errors.

Firebug (for the Firefox browser) is a simple and free tool that can help you keep your small business website humming along, with clean HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. And the great thing about the tool is that it enables you to monitor and make fixes right within your web browser.

Firebug 1.4b1 requires Firefox 3.5b4 or higher (not officially released as of this writing). Therefore, you may need to start with an older version of Firebug, and then upgrade to version 1.4b1 in the near future. You can download older versions of Firebug here.

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As a small business owner or marketer, you are constantly seeking new tools for your online marketing arsenal. One way to take your online marketing to the next level is through Behavioral Targeting. And an easy tool to help you capitalize on this opportunity is BTBuckets.

So, what is Behavioral Targeting (BT), you ask?

Behavioral Targeting leverages web browsing data to launch customized online content or ads to specific individuals. If you visit a website that uses BT, based on the pages you visit or the searches you make or the actions you take on the site, you may be presented with customized pages and/or ads that the site has found effective with your type of browsing behavior.

So, what is BTBuckets?

It’s a free on-site segmentation and Behavioral Targeting tool. With BTBuckets you can create user clusters based on behaviors your visitors exhibit on your website. The tool is flexible, and enables you to define the categories (or buckets) you’d like to track and to which you’d like to serve customized pages/ads.

To take your Behavioral Targeting to the next level, BTBuckets integrates into freely available Google tools such as Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.

For case studies and examples of the tool in action, check out the BTBuckets blog.

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Bing is here! Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine, just launched this week. It’s being promoted as a “decision” engine, helping searchers find relevant information in a more holistic, semantically-friendly manner.

The jury is still out.

Bing appers to be a good engine, and the engine results appear to be relevant. The most immediately noticeable feature is perhaps the categorization of searches, and these categories can be found on the left side of the page. Also, by moving your cursor to the right of the search result, little snippets of additional information from the website appear, and this is useful. Another nice feature is the visual display of the Image and Video tab results – rather cool.

However, in terms of innovation, Bing falls short. The features Microsoft is touting do not really raise the bar significantly, and some of them can already be found elsewhere online including Ask.com.

Overall, Bing is nice. It’s not revolutionary.

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In a recent study, it was found that the second most important factor in a website for men is speed, or load-time of the web pages. (First was ease of use – same as for women.)

Given the importance of load times, are you sure that your web pages are loading fast enough?

To confirm the speed at which your pages are loading, check out Site-Perf. It’s a super easy-to-use load-testing tool. Simply enter the URL you want to test, select a geographic destination for the server closest to you, and away you go.

If your web pages take more than a few seconds to load, consider taking corrective action, such as optimization of images, reduction of the number of images, simplification of the code, etc.

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In our recent post "Harvesting Ideas Online to Solve Tough Problems," we touched upon the value of crowdsourcing as a mechanism for generating ideas and solving problems for your business.

In the same spirit, we would like to introduce Passenger, an on-demand, online customer collaboration tool. The solution includes the collaboration platform in combination with client service/support. As Passenger is a software as a service (SaaS) model, there’s no need for any IT integration, downloads or add-ons. Simply log on through your web browser.

Passenger can be used to inject the voice of your customer into your product/service development, and more specifically, the company suggests the following potential uses of its collaboration solution:

Market & Customer Insight

* Monitor shifts in perspective
* Identify current and emerging needs
* Discover counter-intuitive opportunities

Customer-Driven Innovation

* Deliver what customers need
* Identify and refine the most salient ideas
* Extend existing strengths and capabilities

Brand Advocacy

* Empower key customers through participation in the process
* Fuel passion for your brand

Website Marketing NOW is a major advocate of customer collaboration to drive your small business forward. Passenger is just one more potential tool for your arsenal to engage with your customers and to leverage their insights in driving innovation for your business growth.

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Check it out. Google has just released a new feature as part of its Google Trends service, enabling users to access data about websites, as opposed to data strictly about searches (which had been the traditional focus of Google Trends up until this point).

Whereas in the past the tool was limited to the generation of search query volume data over time, Google Trends now provides the user with the following additional types of data for websites:

• Website traffic (daily unique visitor volumes and trends).
• Keywords (keyword phrases that the website’s visitors are likely to search for).
• Related-sites (other sites that the website’s visitors are likely to visit).
• All of the above data points can be refined by region or timeframe.

Using commas to separate domain names, you can calculate the comparative data for up to five websites at a time. And if you log in to your Google account prior to using the tool, you get access to additional data, such as the actual daily unique visitor estimates as opposed to just a relative visual representation.

Consider Google Trends for Websites just one more tool for your online competitive intelligence toolbox. Just keep in mind that the tool is being criticized for providing inaccurate website traffic numbers, which is a similar complaint directed at other traffic tracking services such as Compete.com, Alexa.com and QuantCast.com. Even so, it can act as one more point of reference that can be useful when conducting online competitive intelligence, and the data is certain to become more and more reliable over time.