
"Wave is an open-source set of protocols, platforms and products that enable anyone to put together services that allow people to create and share content and display applications with one another using non-proprietary web programming standards."Google Wave has the potential to sweep aside some of the many obstacles limiting corporate work productivity, enterprise data sharing and effective collaboration, and, if successful, it could impact organizational work in a way that may deeply change the way people inside companies operate and create value. If your suspicion too, is that sooner than expected you'll see Wave inside your own Gmail inbox, the analysis that follows is going to help you better understand the value and opportunities that may likely emerge with the arrival of this new technology. While other companies are still trying to leverage their ownership of technology intellectual property, Google learned long ago that it's far more important to own the moments that people create when interacting with technology itself. Here is content media expert John Blossom, analysis on what Google Wave is and may soon become:
One Space To Rule The Cloud: Google Wave Creates a Backbone For The Real-Time Web
by John BlossomIt's been a busy week for attention-getting events in content technologies, with the Google I/O developer's conference in San Francisco vying for mindshare with the All Things D conference in San Diego. Both were important events in their own right, with Steve Ballmer's announcement of a preview launch for Microsoft's new Bing search engine facing off against Google's announcement of Google Wave, a new technology that promises to deliver a new standard for common messaging and collaboration infrastructure for both the web and enterprises. Hmm, yet another stab at launching a Live.com successor versus a reworking of email, wikis, real-time messaging and file sharing in one swoop. Which event should Walt and Kara have been covering in more detail? I think that I'll take door two, though Bing is worth taking a gander at in its own right. Mind you, Google giving away free Android phones with a month's free call and data time to developers at I/O certainly upped the attention-getting factor a little bit, as well.
The Google Wave Revolution

Google Wave Main Features

- A "wave" can be any number of digital objects - messages, documents, images, embedded applications - that can be exposed to people just by dragging and dropping a profile icon into the Wave object.
- Wave enables concurrent real-time information transfer to and from collaborators. So although you can view completed messages in Wave as you would an email, instant message or other completed communication, you can also experience it as a real-time conversation or collaboration. As you type, the characters of your message appear in the other person's browser as they are being typed. People can type together in multiple languages (with real-time translation as needed). The real-time semantic spell-checker is pretty amazing in the demo. The open-source Wave protocol makes this all happen.
- Wave objects can start out as a simple message, have replies and participants added, enables people to share private messages from within the wave, can allow people to edit an object concurrently and to view those edits as they are happening concurrently, can use rich text with drag and drop hyperlinks, allows the dragging and dropping of videos, images, texts, hyperlinks, enables rich tagging - and can do this all in real-time on any platform that uses the Wave protocols, including enterprise platforms.
- Anyone can develop Wave-compatible applications, including those who want them "inside the firewall" of an enterprise. Demos were given on Wave working in Google's own Chrome browser but also Firefox and on iPhones as well as Google's own Android mobile smart phones. Examples in the I/O demo of an "Acme" third party implementation of Wave and an embedded "Twave" application for including Twitter messages in Wave underscored that any developer can use Wave protocols and standards to develop compatible applications that leverage Wave capabilities.
In other words, this is a complete rethink of how we use Internet-based messaging to communicate and to collaborate, enabling content to be assembled in web cloud infrastructure as real-time conversations. It's young technology also, to be sure, but it rides on the back of the enormous cloud infrastructure resources that Google and others have assembled over the past several years. Whatever scalability and reliability issues need to be worked out for Wave are small compared to the decades of effort it has taken to get infrastructure in place already to keep up with Wave's potential. If you think of how the relatively simple Twitter infrastructure has been tweaked and kept alive with fairly few "fail whale" outages during its exponential growth of the past year, then it's probably safe to say that the potential for Wave to grow rapidly as a market force in real-time and collaborative messaging is not likely to be gated by basic issues such as networking and servers. Given the slow adoption rate amongst software developers for Google's Open Social programming interface, though, it was far from certain that developers were going to get jazzed up about Wave as something that deserved their attention - hence the high-energy introduction for Wave at the I/O event.
Google Wave and Android

Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on June 1st 2009 as "One Space to Rule The Cloud: Google Wave Creates a Backbone for the Real-Time Web.".
About the author

Photo credits: The Google Wave Revolution - Katrina Brown edited by Daniele Bazzano