If you like many are struggling with keeping up with the barrage of communications from emails, blogs, Skype & MSN chats and many more new media sources then you will be grateful for Google’s Wave.
Google developers have been toiling away breathing life into this unifying platform and it is really looking like a winner on a number of levels.
Wave is a ’single inbox’ for emails, instant messages and all other forms of online communications, but it is so much more than that.
Integration
Wave combines individual internet communications from various channels while maintaining message context similar to discussion forums threads.
This approach enables participants to have multiple message discussions (online conversations ?) independent of the platform each individual is utilising.
Chat or IM conversations are digested into Wave and displayed in near real time, while slower communications such as emails are structured as and when they arrive into your Wave inbox.
I’m just reflecting momentarily about email being described as a slow communication…
Is email being too slow for some forms of communications..?
Quite apart from the highly functional merger of disparate internet communications there are two other key aspects where I see Wave further consolidating Google’s total online world domination.
Open source
Google are producing Wave as an open source product, which fundamentally means Wave is free.
Sure there may be some costs, but if you compare these with the licences costs say for example for an equivalently functional Microsoft server solution (even though I don’t think there is one yet) there will be no financial competition.
Extensibility
The other and probably strongest reason Wave will dominate stems from the strategy to include the ability for software developers to easily integrate Wave into their own solutions.
Many applications need an online communications/synchronisation capability and integration with Wave will fast-track the realisation of many concepts into viable solutions.
Consider the plethora of iPhone applications that have exploded into existence; these are only available to you & me because of the iPhone platform’s extensibility. These applications would have continued to exist only as agonizingly brilliant concepts but not commercially viable because of the costs and impossible logistics to establish the supporting infrastructure required.
A lateral albeit non-business application is the Sudoku game in the You Tube video below that illustrates real-time multiple participant interactivity…
Geeks everywhere already know about Wave. Google is generating peer group hype by using the same limited access marketing they did originally with GMail ie can only particulate in the beta Wave program if you’re invited…
When business gets their head around the opportunities Wave represents it will explode onto our desktops.
Standby for the Google Wave tsunami.
