Google has recently shown off an amazing new product out of it’s labs: Google Wave. The hour-plus long demo is actually captivating the whole time through, in part because of the exciting new methods of streamlining and optimizing of so many communications protocols and technologies. It may be a long watch, but I heartily recommend the viewing for anyone that is interested in where the web is going relative to where it has come from in terms of mass user adopted messaging and communications standards of today and the recent past.
Waves can serve to replace traditional emails in that they allow users participating in the Wave to reply to the message sent by a familiar thread-like response system. Waves can also replace instant messaging chat dialogs in that responses and changes made to the wave can be seen in real time. Waves support embedded video, images, widgets, and more– they can be collaboratively edited like documents and by proxy can be easily adapted for wiki-like use as well as blogging and live blogging. In the demo, users subscribed to the blog on which the Wave was published could respond as the blogger was blogging! This obviously holds great potential value for business efficiency not only in meetings and the dissemination of information across an organizational body, but also in planning, coordination, and implementation of data driven perogatives– especially once the spreadsheet collaboration capabilities go live shortly after public release.
Another fascinating aspect of Google Wave that particularly relates to Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Services is that it can be used interactively and extensibly with existing social networking technologies, such as Twitter. A Wave and a Tweet can work synchronously in a manner that produces a ‘Twave’, a thread-like conversation comprised of both contributions to the Wave, the Twitter page of the participants, and any and all Twitter clients involved.
What will be interesting to see is exactly to what degree users embrace this new avenue for communication and collaboration. From what can be seen in the demo even the fledgling iterations showcased seem to make exciting use of the strengths inherent to Google Wave, and given that the code is open-sourced, we’ll be getting our hands on even more implementations of the exciting new Wave technology. Will end users abandon their comfortable emailing/messaging/blogging/Twittering clients in light of the unified and concentrated communicative capabilities of a more robust and established Google Wave? Time will tell…
