It’s not Google Wave, its Tsunami
Before writing this post, I contemplated for a long time if I should write on Microsoft’s Bing or on Google Wave but then the scale of change in Google wave tilted the argument in favor of Google Wave. The first three applications I used on Internet were email, Search and Instant Messaging. Search changed a lot since the arrival of Google on the scene. However, email and IM are largely unchanged since Internet was conceptualized in the military labs and education institutes in early seventies and have not incorporated the technological advancements in the area of online collaboration.
There are many things that one does in different applications, e.g. the conversations in MSN Chat, photos in Flickr, videos in YouTube, articles on Wiki and documents on computer. Any project or communication could be a combination of messages, photos, videos and documents but since the data is dispersed, it is difficult to share. Organising the documents in itself could be a time consuming task leave aside real time collaboration. Google recently talked about its intentions to release a new communications tool called Google Wave incorporating the different collaboration tools and making it real-time. The official launch is expected to be towards the end of the year but in the meantime, it has been opened for the developer community.
What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is a real time communication platform. It brings together email, instant messaging, documents and picture sharing, blogs, wiki, Facebook and Twitter into one service that is easy and intuitive to understand and use. I am reproducing the definition of wave from the official Google site:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Key Features of Google Wave:
Google Wave has many features and they are still in the development stage. Due to the open source, I expect the final product to have far more functionalities than the current version. However, the basic features of Google Wave are as follows
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Communications – Google Wave seamlessly combines the features of email, instant messaging and Wikis into a single platform
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Collaboration is the strongest feature of Google Wave. It has the Wiki functionality that allows any users to edit the document, add blogs, pictures, videos or any file by just “Drag & Drop”. This way, the entire thread of communication is in one wave and the wave can be edited to keep it more current
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The wave is a live document which shows up on the screens of the users real-time. This means the users can see who is editing the document and can provide their feedback or comments at the same time. The live document makes wave an excellent collaboration tool
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Open Platform – The most important feature of Google Wave as with other Google products is that it is an open platform. The APIs are available to the developers to develop applicationsand wave extensions. This open source of Google wave would ensure that the utility of Google Wave keeps increasing with time. Facebook gained popularity after it was thrown open to application developers
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Embed ability – The waves can be embedded in any blog or website and hence mass collaboration is possible
How does it work?
Google Wave is simple to use though initially, the users may find it difficult due to multiple features that have been clubbed into one. The process starts with creating a wave and sharing it with others with whom one wants to communicate or collaborate. Anybody can join anytime even in the middle of the conversation. The users reply to the wave or edit it or add content on to the wave to make it a working document. The updates are visible real time to all the users and any user can playback any part of the wave to come up to speed in case one has joined the wave late.
As visible from the screen shot (I admit it is difficult to see but this is the best image Google has released), there would be many waves on the screen of an individual. Each individual wave is like a project and each wave would have different set of collaborators. The wave would be the complete thread of discussion and would consist of Wavelets. A Wavelet is a subset of a wave and one or more wavelets would form the wave. Similarly, one or more Blip forms a wavelet. This means Blip is the smallest form of communication in a wave. The set of people who are part of different wavelets could be different. Imagine a large project with different modules in it. Different people could be working on different modules and each module can have multiple work streams. The work streams are the Blip, modules are Wavelets and the project in itself is the wave.
Apart from a wave, wavelet and blip, there are other components of a wave like robots, extensions and gadgets which are nothing but the applications developed by developers to enhance the capability of the wave. These run within the wave just the way applications are there in Facebook or Linkedin with the only difference being that the applications here would enhance collaboration.
What does Google Wave hold for Future?
Google Wave is likely to replace the current communication and collaboration tools as the functionality offered by Google Wave is far superior. This would make the communication faster and clearer thereby saving time of the users. If adopted on a mass scale, it has serious implications on many industries and companies.
The biggest impact could be on Microsoft SharePoint. Since the advent of Google, Microsoft is trying to play catching up game in the Internet space while holding turf in the enterprise collaboration tools segment. SharePoint has been a formidable revenue engine for Microsoft, and a big reason for this success is that it’s also a development platform around which Microsoft ISVs can develop their own vertically-oriented SharePoint add-ons. So it’s possible Google simply wants to create an open-source collaboration platform alternative to SharePoint. Due to its compelling features that are well suited for corporate, it would not be surprising if it gets adopted by the enterprises in a big way. The project management functionality of Google Wave would be very handy for the enterprise segment. However, Google would need to make the product more secure to meet the requirements of the enterprise segment but then it should not be too difficult.
Wave’s competence with multiple modes of communication seems likely to doom tools with more focused functionality like email, instant messaging, etc. that does not add unique value. It could have a big impact on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and RIM. The entire value proposition of Blackberry is built around messaging. With a fundamental shift in the way people would communicate in future, there is a big question mark on future of Blackberry unless it is able to adopt the new ways of communication.
Google Wave may have big impact on the file sharing sites like Picassa, Flickr, etc. I see people collaborating on making an online family photo album on Google Wave adding comments and anecdotes.
Since the data and other information would be available in the cloud, it is going to increase mobility and could lead to the growth of netbooks as the not much computing power would be required for online collaboration and it would possible to use the computing power of some other user.
Both Google Wave and Twitter are both forms of real-time communication. Does this mean that Google would soon take over Twitter or will it be able to ward off the competition from Twitter as it now has its own real-time communications tool in the form of Google Wave? I believe that the former is more likely. Google has a great advertising model which could monetize Twitter and Twitter is a tested platform with huge user base. This user base would be a ready consumer of Google Wave. I would not be surprised it Google takes over Twitter sooner than later.
Challenges to Success of Google Wave
The biggest hurdle I see in adoption of Google Wave is that the consumers may find it complex and difficult to use. People are used to current methods of communications and old habits die hard. Google has not been very successful with Google Docs and Google talk as it was not easy to use and Google did a poor job in communicating with the potential users. Google would need to handhold and talk to users more often to be able to make them comfortable with the new way of communication.
Google would also need to channelize the application development on Google Wave. Discovery of the right application would be a challenge for the users. Google has a lot of gadgets on its portal (iGoogle) but I am not sure how many Google users are even aware of them.
Another challenge for Google would be to pull off Google Wave. In the past, many products have been launched by Google with much fanfare but never went beyond the beta stage as they failed to live up to the expectations that were built in the run-off to the launch. Google Wave is a complex product and all the things need to fall in place before it can become a reality. Google has not been able to successfully launch mass user base products except for search. Success of Google Wave would lie in its ability to emulate the reach of search.
In summary,People often talk about email becoming passé with the younger generation using IM as the media to converse with each other. I wonder if both could be things of past soon with advent of Google Wave if Google is able to successfully meet all the challenges.
Google has released video of Thursday’s keynote speech at Google I/O in San Francisco, where the company publicly demonstrated Google Wave for the first time before about 4,000 developers.
The above article is basis my understanding of Google Wave. However, there would be many more things that I may have missed. I would request the readers to contribute to the list of new features and the potential use cases for this product.
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I agree with you that this will change the way many of us work, I was completely blown away by the demo. I don’t see that immediate threat to SharePoint however. I don’t see Wave as a document repository. I rather see Microsoft’s stronghold on the business users through Exchange and Outlook as a block for Wave.
As Wave is open source, with open APIs, etc, it should be fairly straight forward for Microsoft to integrate Wave with Exchange. I.e., add Wave functionality to their platform. A win-win for both companies?
The Wave demo was amazing. The real-time collaboration features (dragging in new participants; hiding private parts of the conversation) and ability to replay threads was not a new idea since we all do this today with current tools with varying levels of success. What was great was that Google understood this and created Wave to allow us to do this with more ease and discipline
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As for corporations handing over work conversations and information to the open internet? I don’t think so. The reason is because it’s not just about a great interface or way of organizing info it’s about the security and integrity of the open internet. You mention the Blackberry. Yes, its a good form-factor and great interface for messaging and communications, but the secret sauce is its dedicated messaging server (separate from your regular mobile service) and security derived from this which enables a higher SLA (even though BB has failed once or twice.)
But, remember it’s hard to change folks’ habits. Several years ago an analyst asked whether internet users were happy with a single destination for email, IM, photos etc. At the time I said “No.” I was still using several destinations for these services. The Wave and other new services make me reconsider my answer, but I still prefer Flickr over Picasa. I use Yahoo way more than Gmail. I don’t IM, but if I do my networks are on Skype and Facebook. So it looks like my bookmarks will remain intact for now. However, I’d love to add wave.google.com to that list (I just made that up:) )
Sp
Hi,
I too was massively excited about this as in a sense it models some of my wishes for convergence between these different services. I have already often used IM (google talk and skype) to send people short messages knowing that they were not online, but would pick them up as soon as they were – instead of email – and then picked up the conversation in real-time later.
In some cases, I have even done this for work related items – although I am sure this is against company policy. However, this is where once again, despite the promise and the theory, how much of the internet revolution is going to revolutionise the corporate world – and how much is going to be limited to the social, entertainment and media worlds?
The fact that google brings in things like facebook and picasso says to me straight away ‘Not Corporate’ and makes me suspect that they know this and are not aiming at it. (Initially)
I really do not know how much corporate world buy in this will get and at the end of the day – is this really an entertainment service or an economic enabler? I suspect ‘Internet Startups’ and creative type industries will rush to adopt – but will large corporates? I doubt it – but it will no-doubt spawn closed wall versions with adoption of some features by corporates.
Unified messaging is definitely desirable and wanted by the corporate world – but in this form … I think not?
I like Wave for it’s functionality, however I don’t see email nor IMs disappearing either. IMs are very useful for quick, time sensitive messages as well as just a fast Hi, I’m -working, -so -are –you- so -let’s -get -together -later type conversations. Emails are usually longer and are also private for the most part not only by design but by choice. Many messages wouldn’t transition well or at all from IMs and email to Wave. Corporate communications are already handled by other applications that have the same functionality as Wave so it’s a competition to those methods, not a replacement for them.
The very openness that Google touts for Wave (the only ‘new’ feature that I can discern so far) is a major limit to it’s marketing. Privacy is a huge issue with quite a few on my IM and email lists so I usually Cc instead of using the address bar as per request by friends and business associates alike. Then you have the differences between communications: some I send links on website development, some music industry insider information, some are artists, some gardeners, etc… They aren’t interested in what I send to the others on my list. Sure Wave can be made private, buy why take up the bandwidth when an email or IM will suit the purpose just fine?
btw, Bandwidth usage is an issue I haven’t seen addressed yet. There are quite a few very active computer users who are on older models and my impression is that Wave can really suck the juice even in the early stages of a Wave. What happens to a Wave conversation as it ages? Is it still back there, sucking bandwidth, is it auto archived to save bandwidth for users? If the former, what’ s being done about low end computer users participating in discussions on a Wave?
Moving back to the privacy issue, when I’m writing everyone knows to leave me alone to write in peace. I can’t concentrate if someone’s reading over my shoulder so can imagine the writer’s block that would be created if people could respond in real time when I type. My question is why bother, other than to have a new toy? It’s not only polite to wait until someone’s made their point completely before interrupting, it’s conducive to rational debate. I don’t want to see what a blogger/educator is typing until they’re done. Their thoughts aren’t complete until they hit send. Then I can read it, analysis it and respond in a thoughtful manner.
Sorry, but I don’t see Wave as innovative and useful at this point.
As per my understanding Wave wd be a common networking platform along with better UI & sophisticated gadgets, that u may even get by configuring ur gmail settings. There are so many gadgets available through Labs(google) also some uri based online gadgets can be configured. Even u may ur facebook & myspace!
Wave is more of a fun material for students! as almost all google stuffs available all together. But no doubt about the developing team, HATS OFF to them for what they’ve achieved.
Luved te Real-time concept(Wave/ Wavelet & Blips)
But I’ve just happened to find out a site http://www.zoho.com/
i agree compete’g with google wd b too early to say…..
but this one provides n number of gadgets n tool to deal with personal & professional data
Zoho Show : Zoho Show Online presentation tool
Zoho Invoice : Zoho Invoice Online Invoicing. Quick and Easy
Zoho Writer : Zoho Writer Online word processor
Zoho Reports : Zoho Reports Online Database & Reporting
Zoho CRM : Zoho CRM On-demand Customer Relationship Management solution
Zoho Creator : Zoho Creator Online web applications creator
Zoho Planner : Zoho Planner Online organizing tool
Zoho Docs : Zoho Docs Online Document Management
Zoho Sheet : Zoho Sheet Online spreadsheet service
Zoho Meeting : Zoho Meeting Web Conferencing
Zoho Share : Zoho Share Centralized Public Repository
Zoho Notebook : Zoho Notebook Online Note Taker
Zoho Projects : Zoho Projects Project Management
Zoho Wiki : Zoho Wiki Online Wiki with public, private & group permissions
Zoho Chat : Zoho Chat Instant messaging and group chat tool
hope u like this!
Avishek
I feel google popularity will make google wave successful. We have already seen the rush on orkut…
Google Wave looks as a very promising tool, something that I was personally looking forward to for a very long time. But, as with all other communication channels, it really depends on the number of people using the communication platform, and even if I like to use it very much, it is unusefull, or at least not giving the full potential until the time most of the people will be on. Which will take a lot of time to Google, and would require mainly the motivation of people to recommend such platform to others.
And I agree that even if Google (the users of gmail) will be sucessful in this, it will become mainly the personal communication tool, with middle and large companies still communicating via Outlook.
Hey, great post, really well written. You should blog more about this.
Tell us about Microsoft’s Bing? Is it a competing project?
Bing is a search engine can would be in competition with Google’s search engine and not with Google Wave. Bing has brought in a few interesting features like watching videos inside the search engine itself without visiting the site. Bing also claims that it gives out fewer but more relevant results for the search.
Google has expressed that their goal is to build a development environment that provides, among other things, a ‘social networking framework’ rather than discrete programs that run as silos. This strategy requires providing open standard APIs and interfaces to proprietary social networks, LBS, and other common capabilities.
The ‘name of the game’ for web OS and device suppliers is to be the ‘best damn enablers’ as possible because that is what the market inevitably will gravitate towards.