There had been some speculation of Google’s dominating position online, what with Twitter implementing real time search, Microsoft unveiling Bing and buying Yahoo. However, as we should have suspected, Google had an ace up its sleeve.

Wave is the new personal communication and collaboration tool from Google, and is set to revolutionise how we communicate online by combining all past and present mediums into one essential app of the future. Wave amalgamates email and instant messaging, wikis and social media into a single user friendly application that allows real time collaboration involving rich media. A typical ‘wave’ will be equal parts conversation and document where you can share photos, text, videos and maps. Here’s a paragraph from Google’s blog where one of Wave’s key developers Lars Rasmussen can describe its functionality far better than I can.

“Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”

This playback feature is pretty slick and one of those simple but elegant attributes that Google is so good at implementing into their apps. The sharing of other media such as photos is done by simple drag and drop which keeps things nice and easy. There’s also a natural language tool which acts as a spell check as well as making contextual suggestions based on where your server is located.

There’s been a strong ripple effect across the web since their 80 minute presentation hit YouTube, and now cyberspace is alive with discussions of Wave’s potential across all industries. Because it’s so flexible as an application it can be adapted for all sorts of projects involving multiple team members. If Wave was introduced to the newsroom it could have great effect on the journalistic process, from researching a story, to collecting witness statements and getting it proofed by a sub-editor. But it won’t just be adults reaping the benefits. Apparently Google have given schools an early trial of Wave to test it as an educational tool. Children can use the app to share ideas on the start of a new project, and teachers can use it to elicit a more interactive working environment.

Never content with the natural ebb and flow of the digital tide, Google are once again surfing a new wave of pixelated potential. But in what other sectors could Wave have a profound effect?

Posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 10:45 am in Google, Industry News, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.