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Recently I saw the video from Google I/O about Google Wave and I must said that I'm astonished, the application and the concept just look amazing. For those of you that don't know Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.
Actually Google Wave is much more, if it works as demoed by the Google gang the potential that this has is huge, Google Wave is not only an app but also a set of Api's and a damn Protocol, this means than as anyone can run their own email server now you are going to be able to run your own Wave server.
Maybe for some of you this doesn't sound like much, but if you work from home like me and you lose half of your day responding emails and IM, the more efficient, faster and ordered form of communication that Google Wave promises can be priceless.
Running your own server and integrating it into current and new applications is another interesting side of Google Wave, how can Wave change the way people communicate on the Internet.
Right now is to early to realistically measure Wave impact on the cloud but once its on the loose I can guarantee you that its going to leave its mark.
What do you think?
How will Wave change our digital lifes?
How you could use Wave to develop your applications or build new ones?
Allan MacGregor / www.allanmacgregor.com
Thanks for your thoughts Allan. I actually chose to write about Google Wave on my Telegraph blog this week. I'm waiting to hear about some of the first extensions to be developed by those that were at Google I/O and watched this speech live:
Google's open sourcing of the Wave protocol initially seemed like a mistake to me - I thought that surely there would be no room left for monetisation. After a brief chat with a friend of mine, I was reminded that "this is Google", and just having their brand name attached to it is enough.
Surely Google will run Wave as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) so they can charge a premium for businesses, just like they currently do with Google Apps. Either way, how long until I can drop mail.mled.me and start using wave.mled.me?
Google are leading from the front, demonstrating what can be achieved with HTML5 and showing everyone a better use for a real-time web than FriendFeed. Companies will be free to install and run their own rival platforms, and through open standards and some cunning API usage, Wave is inter-operable with any other hosted instance on outside servers.
Users will communicate as privately as possible and have easier control over privacy during open discussions than available with current mailing lists. Unless directly contacting a Google Wave account, nothing will pass through Google's servers if a discussion involves parties on other Wave servers.
I can see some potential similarities arising with the direction cloud computing is now headed, where both private and public clouds are used by companies for their data. Perhaps we'll see a hybridisation of Wave for enterprise use, so that current and company sensitive data is kept on a firm's internal Wave platform, which is later archived to a public platform.
Ultimately, I don't think any company that builds their own Wave platform from the specification at waveprotocol.org will be able to claim theirs is "better" than Google's Wave, it will just be different.
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