Last week at their annual developer conference, Google unveiled a new collaboration offering: They took Email, Instant Messaging, Wikis, Web Applications, and Twitter, threw them into a open standards-based blender, and created an interesting new collaborative cocktail called Google Wave.
If you want a sneak peek at how the cool kids will be getting things done next year, check out the developer preview video. Wave will not likely be released as a Google offering until the end of the year, but they are starting to build out the Wave developer ecosystem sooner rather than later.
Wave's appeal will crosscut consumer, small business, and enterprise circles alike, for while Google is the creator of Wave, they are releasing specifications code so that organizations will be able to run their own Wave servers. Additionally, Wave servers run by different organizations will be able to talk among themselves (or "federate") so that cross-organization collaboration can take place using Wave.
In other words, Wave is not the next "Gmail"-like product from Google, but rather the next "Email"-like standard for network-based collaboration for the Internet.
I think that Google just demoed the Next Big Thing, and CIOs will be at liberty to investigate it regardless of their stance on Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, or many other buzzphrases of recent memory. This is possible because Wave servers will be able be employed on either side of the corporate firewall, both literally and figuratively.
Personally, I find Wave to be particularly interesting because I had the good fortune to spend time working with the folks from Groove Networks in the 2000/2001 timeframe. There are many similarities between Groove and Wave, particularly around the idea of persistent, context-relevant "shared spaces" where individuals across multiple organizations can engage in secure real-time communication and collaboration aided by autonomous agents or "bots".
One key difference between Groove and Wave is that Wave was built for a network-enabled world, where every local coffeehouse serves copious amounts of free Wi-Fi bandwidth, whereas Groove was built to thrive in austere environments (e.g. battlefield, post-disaster, etc.), where Starbucks exists only in daydreams and network connectivity is intermittent at best.
(As an aside, one other curious similarity is that they were both created by small teams anchored by two brothers: Wave was created by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, and Groove was created by Ray and Jack Ozzie.)
Christian and I did some non-trivial bot development in Groove, and did a bunch of XMPP bot-related stuff in ProjectPipe. We're looking forward to start building useful things in Wave, and will certainly have more to say about Wave in the coming months.
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