Tuesday, 28. July 2009
Wave? What is that? What is Google’s latest bid for world domination? Well, in technical terms, Google Wave is a “web based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.”
In casual terms, it means they want to make one web application (keep in mind this is all based around HTML 5) that will integrate e-mail, IM, your Twitter and Facebooks of the world, wikipedia entries, Photobucket type sharing and more, all in one window. Plus open it up for developers to take it in whatever direction they want from there. In short, they want to take over the world. And I signed up for the beta. (That’s all it is right now, 100,000 people will be invited in September).
Err…what? It sounds like it is a mash-up of everything. And…it pretty much is. And it looks like it does it very very well. And in this blog writer’s humble opinion, it will change EVERYTHING.
I bold everything because I really do think there are huge social, business and casual implications to a platform that is attempting to merge every one of our major online services into one platform. And I don’t mean they will just have a window here for e-mail, and a window over there for IM, and a window up here for Twitter and put in all in one big window. No, this goes deeper.
They want to integrate the back and forth threading, forwarding, replies and attachments of email, merge it into an IM style real-time chat system (completely with literal real-time, character by character updates of you typing, instead of seeing “Joe is typing” for an hour), add some VCR features (any new people added to a “Wave” can see a play-by-play of the conversation as it happened), allow users to simultaneously upload, download, and delete pictures and integrate a very sophisticated spell checker into the whole process – with this one Google puts a bid on redoing the damage the last few years have done to our “lol u guz r da gr8tst” youth. And if you can’t read that, don’t hurt your brain trying to, I did just writing it.
Add in the fact they are opening this up to development, open source style, and you have something that will be as huge as Facebook, at least in the applications side of things.
Imagine if businesses were to adopt Google Wave en masse. Pizza Hut gets Wave, and offers it to their customers. Pizza Hut tweets through Wave a special deal they are offering for the day. Customer A decides he or she wants to order a pizza based on the Tweet he or she receives through Wave. Instead of calling, or working through the online ordering system, maybe an application has been developed for Wave that allows the customer and an employee direct conversation for ordering a pizza. The customer jumps into a new wave with a Pizza Hut employee, the employee takes the order and away we go.
This is a simple example that probably won’t even be close to anything that will come out, I’m sure what will come along will be WAY more cool than anything that I could think of.
Imagine for businesses. You are working in a web based company, maybe providing web design, programming, SEO, and admin services for a business.
Customer A contacts Account Executive A and gets the ball rolling. Cus. A needs a new website, web design and some basic SEO services. So AE A opens a new wave between Cus. A, Designer A, Designer B and SEO A, and they all can collaborate between the 4 of them. Plus if Designer B and SEO A need to talk about something inside the Wave, but do not want to start a new one, they can not Wave Designer A and Cus A and just Wave each other, and then when their conversation is finished, go back to Waving everyone.
The business implications are HUGE for this, especially on large projects, with multiple departments working on one single project, or collaborations through different departments.
Even in my business, if I have a digital camera repair that I am working on, and my boss wants me to change the work order, and I’m at home, he can just Wave it to me, and I’ll have a thread based means of replying and seeing it.
So if you are interested even a little bit, get on board, and use the Wave. I strongly believe this will change the face of things, the same way email, IM or social media has changed things.
This one just does it all.