Google Wave – the new form of business collaboration?

Recently Google has introduced their new google wave platform with big media frenzy and on the 30th of September the test pool was released. Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. The code is open sourced as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved and Google invites developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before the public launch.

PC World published on the day of release an interesting article about “Five Reasons to Dive Into Google Wave”.Google Wave is part social networking, and part unified communications, and all Google. Wave combines email, instant messaging, blogging, document sharing, wikis, and multimedia content to provide a seamless communications platform. The main benefits are ‘single point of access’, ‘next-generation communication’, ‘real time sharing and collaboration’, ‘the waves lives on and all wave members are updated in time’, ‘the wave is in the cloud and has web access’.

The fantastic post of Siegler provides a comprehensive overview about the features and functionalities with supporting screens and explanations. It is really worth a read. Another wunderful description of “the top 6 game changing features of Google Wave” was written by Ben Parr.

Wiki style functionality
While Google Wave works a lot like email or IM, there is a huge difference: you can edit not only your messages, but the messages of anybody within your wave. You can reply to messages within a conversation string and reorganize conversations.

Wave extensions
There are two types: gadgets and robots. Gadgets are just like Facebook applications, so you can run an app like an online game or a project management tool from within Wave. Robots are smart, automated conversation participants. They can detect keywords and respond, bring in outside information from services like Twitter and more.

Drag and drop file uploads
In email, you have to search for files, and then attach them before sending. Then you need to open them up when you actually receive the email. Google Wave ignores that entire process by allowing users to drag files from the desktop and dropping them. Anyone can then see the files as they’re being uploaded. Images are shown in an album format, music can be played, and docs can be quickly shared.

Wave embeds
Wave Embeds is just like what it says – you can embed any wave onto a website. Embeds can be customized and used for a multitude of purposes.

Playback
If you’re added to an email conversation late into the game, it can be a pain to parse all of the back-and-forth within an email conversation. With Wave’s playback feature, you can actually see how the entire conversation developed from the start, making it incredibly easy to catch up on conversations.

Open source
Google Wave is not only extendable, but is an open-source project. This means two big things. First, developers can build their own version of Google Wave. Second, Google Wave can be hosted on your own server – just like an Exchange email server.

All this sounds like Google Wave will bring the new form of communication. But how can all this be used by business? Are there efforts to combine Google Wave with other business tools to absorb the full power of communication and collaboration?

The ability to interact in real-time collaborative conversations, record and playback discussion & decision making, Google Wave for business will quite simply ‘blow away’ most current online project management tools, as stated by Entropy Digital. But even though Google Wave is a powerful competitor for many tools, it offers opportunities which should be discovered in an early stage. SAP for example has already developed a prototype of Gravity, a tool for collaborative Business Process Modelling within Google Wave. Gravity is embedded as a Google Wave “gadget” that can be added within the Google Wave client. Leveraging the collaborative features of Google Wave, all business process modelling activities get propagated in near real-time to all other participants of the Wave. In addition, participants of the Wave can use all other features provided by Google and its developer community to enrich the collaborative modelling experience.

Travel agencies could embedd booking extensions to Google Wave and magazines or newspaper can update their clients within a wave. It remains thrilling and in the end stays the question: Do you think it will succeed?