The folks at Google may have come up with a new broadband drain for us. (And I mean that in a good way.) According to their press release, Google Apps Team Edition is “the simplest and fastest way for groups of employees and students to collaborate within an organization using Google Apps(tm). Once users verify their business or school email address, they can instantly share documents and calendars securely without burdening IT for support. Team Edition can easily be switched to Google Apps Standard, Premier or Education Edition for communications and collaboration across the entire company.”

I have to admit that the difference between Google Apps and Google Apps Team Edition is a little fuzzy to me since I have used Google Apps to collaborate with colleagues in the past but I’ll leave that nuance to the administrators. Since the difference doesn’t matter much to me or to Google’s Apps’ possibility of becoming the new killer app.

I was at an event last night where a guy from Google was talking about innovation. He was also pretty quick to mention Google Apps – so either hearing him and getting the Google press release in the same day is quite a coincidence, or they’re pushing this.

What I think is cool about Google Apps as a killer app is that it lets users do something online that we couldn’t do without broadband, in the same way video lets us do something new.

Last year I spoke with Jack Geller about the broadband use in Minnesota reports and I remember him noting that one thing that was interesting in the latest reports on broadband users was that people with broadband were not just doing the regular things faster – they were doing things that couldn’t be done on dialup.

So here’s my vote for killer app of the day. (That’s not a review of the product so much as a vote for the idea. I’ve used Google Apps but don’t feel qualified to review them.)