Google Releases Wave

At the end of May, Google timed its developer’s launch of its new collaborative communications platform – Wave – to perfection, in order to steal much of the attention that the launch of Microsoft Bing was seeking a few days later. Wave, which is designed to be an evolution of email and an Instant Messenger (IM), spent four years in development and was created by the Sydney-based development team behind Google Maps. The launch was received with much acclaim by developers, who are seeing this as potentially a major step-forward in online communication.

Communication within Wave is more like an IM conversation than email, as it intends to combine the older email methodology with the more recent trend in social communication systems, such as Facebook and Twitter. Social networks are designed around conversation ‘threads’ and Wave will enable multi-person conversations in real time through these conversations that Google calls a ‘wave.’ Lars Rasmussen, from the development team, explained that because it integrates email as well as a real-time workflow, Wave allows “Synchronous and asynchronous (communication) in the same conversation. And you can switch back and forth, depending who is online at any one time”.

The potential of Wave is huge. It has been designed to be an open standard platform, rather than just a standard Google product like Maps or Reader, which will allow users to contribute to the same Wave from computers and mobiles, regardless of their operating system. As it’s also developed using a group of development APIs, it will also allow developers to integrate gadgets and robots into Waves. There will be many people who will find this integrated functionality extremely useful and provide new opportunities to develop the service in the future.

Wave therefore has the potential to create massive workplace and communication efficiencies and could significantly change the way web users interact in the digital space over the coming years. The first Alpha version has been tested and the interface is slick and easy to use, giving users the ability to share maps, video images and documents with a simple, drag-and drop interface. Communication is intuitive and not cluttered at all and it works by far the best within Google’s Chrome browser, which is understandable at this stage!

Wave really seems to focus on contacts and people, which is the direction communication is taking. Email applications currently focus less on people and more on the content of the message, so this is where the evolution of Wave is a notable step forward and why the developer community is so excited about the launch and the possibilities that Wave now provides. It may take longer for the general web user community to accept and use this different style of communication but this may also herald the future style of online communication, which would be the most significant development for years, and one that Microsoft may be looking at with envy!

Wave will either massively boost the popularity of social networks, or it will devour them. Either way, the two-way conversations that are the hallmark of Web 2.0 are here to stay and they are only going to get more widespread through the development of communications platforms such as this. Wave was launched to widespread acclaim and hype, but with some great 3rd party apps and greater customisation, it could actually match this hype.

To find out more about how you can enhance your communication capabilities with Wave in the future, please contact us now for more information.

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