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Will Google Wave be the Fifth Wave of the Internet?

The Internet has evolved through four waves since it entered everyday usage: communication, content, commerce and community (aka social media). Will Google Wave usher in a fifth wave: Collaboration?

I know this blog has been really quiet for a while. Quite frankly, nothing has inspired me much in the social media space. I guess I spent too much time as a Forrester analyst and while lots is happening in, I can't get all that excited about yet more social networks (sorry, Spoke, Naymz, et al: you're too late and I have too much invested in LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, and even Eons to start up on more networks).

And while social media monitoring is booming, and we have some great new technological capabilities we are introducing, we're finding it isn't the technology driving our success with clients. It is the good old-fashioned application of smart people like Kate and Jessica who understand our clients' businesses and boil down the social media maelstrom into clear insights.

Then I read about Google Wave which The Official Google Blog describes as "equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

As I read the post where Lars Rasmussen describes the process of defining what this product would be, I found myself nodding at the questions they were asking and the problems they were trying to address: email and IM designed to mimic non-digital communication tools, eliminate the divides between different modes of communications, and others. This reaction is a stark contrast to my feelings about Twitter or even most mobile phone apps.

But better collaboration tools hit home with me. I find myself working more and more closely with colleagues in different offices, clients across the country, vendors and other resources. In my private life even, I am collaborating more and more with other volunteers at my church and other organizations I am involved with. In all of these cases, keeping track of the email chains, document versions or trying to remember which group or wiki or site any particular project is on is becoming a burden. I can already think of half a dozen projects where a better collaboration platform would make my life much easier.

Past Internet waves have frequently been natural evolutions: going from reading about a product online to being able to buy it eliminated the wait and inconvenience of going to the store. Community has made communications to large groups of friend and associates a whole lot better than ccing endless names on an email.

But beyond keeping the community informed of the minutest details of your life and thoughts, what's the real advantage? Collaboration strikes me as being a great candidate for the answer to this question.

So I can't wait to try Wave. Who knows -- if it makes me more productive I might just have more time to blog....

Posted by Jim Nail on May 29, 2009 at 02:57 PM | Email this post Permalink
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Comments

Jim, when you are inspired by something, I take notice.

Thanks for making me aware of Google Wave and the promise of improving my ability to collaborate with folks in multiple locations. I've been working with a group in Denmark and in France. I've been getting up at 3 AM in the morning to collaborate on conference calls. Plus, we've been stumbling with sharepoint and FTP sites, none of them good collaboration tools. I'm in need of Google Wave.

Posted by: Tom McMillian | May 29, 2009 5:51:27 PM

Thanks for coming by, Tom. Your reaction confims my gut that this has great potential. Google has announced it, but it won't be available until later in the year. So we'll both have to wait a while, darnit.

Posted by: Jim Nail | May 29, 2009 5:59:10 PM

Google has some great tools now thanksfor the info.

Posted by: perry | Jun 24, 2009 1:47:32 PM

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