Everyone, Group Wave!!

Google unveiled their Wave communication platform the other day and after finally making time to watch the entire presentation, I am floored.

In a nutshell, the system allows for realtime asynchronous communication of text, media, documents with a central repository. What this means is that communication is instant, there are no more boundaries between different forms of digital communication allowing for instantaneous knowledge sharing across all mediums with no data duplication. I can generalize all I want but it is hard to visualize the applications until you watch the demonstration.

My first thought on seeing the applications demonstrated was “Great, another fantastic tool ruined by the need to store the data on Google”. Holy cow was I wrong, they created the system to be open source and designed it so that multiple Wave systems can exist, like one local to your company, and they federate with other Wave systems, allowing for inter-system communication while still allowing restricted access and data storage based on your system’s configuration. This is how current Instant Messaging servers work, allowing companies to hook IM to their local directory and store/log all local and outgoing messages (if needed). That level of control is vital to corporate adoption of this tool, and the fact that they threw monetization to the wind and are providing everything for free is astounding.

Companies like Microsoft will have no choice but to integrate it into their products or independent developers will do it for them. Large segments of popular server and client systems will become defunct as this new protocol takes hold. The only question is how long will it take to adopt the Wave?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 5:21 am and is filed under Collaboration, Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.