[Originally posted in Venture, December 2009]

Google changed the web, and with that, the world.

That is the corniest opening-sentence possible, I know, but just google it to see what I mean. Last week, I watched a live U2 concert on YouTube along with 10 million other people. I used a report generated by Analytics to pinpoint customer trends for a certain project, without the need for surveys or elaborate softwares. I found my way to Shatana, a small village near Irbid, using Google Maps. You get my point.

Today, Google is inducing yet more tides of change on the shores of the World Wide Web with Wave, the shiniest new toy-in-the-cloud that everyone is talking about. In a nutshell, Wave is email, instant messaging, and a collaborative work tool shoved together then injected with steroids. It is, as Google says, “What email would look like if it were invented today.”

The idea is not as simple as you would expect from the company whose claim to fame is a website with two buttons. In Wave, instead of sending emails back and forth, you create web-page-like documents named ‘waves’ that others can adjust or comment on. You can also view the images and files attached to it as slideshows, use it to update your Twitter account, and even play Soduku with your contacts. You can keep track of changes happening on the wave with its awesome play-back feature, share maps and directions, and add extra functionality from a big list of gadgets and robots. Who doesn’t like a service that is not just built for humans?

Game-changing, to say the least.

Yet, it is not the comprehensive feature list that might make Wave revolutionizing. The revolution will really come if the masses are willing to embrace the powerful idea of live-time editing, conversing, planning, and collaborating online. Their reaction to Wave could change the infrastructure of the web forever, even if Wave ends up becoming the Segway of the internet.

But will it? My gut feeling is that this idea will be embraced. Eventually.

The market will probably have no idea what to do with Wave, let alone how to use it to make daily tasks easier, for a couple of years. By the time people are more comfortable and familiar with online collaborative working, Google Wave would need an overhaul, perhaps even become integrated with GMail or vice-versa. A million other services based on Wave that do either less or more will have also sprung up, with happier colors and shorter life spans. By that time, Wave could possibly be the antiquated grandfather of cooler services, in the same way that Geocities (RIP) is now thought of as the ancestor of blogs.

Not that any of that matters. Whether Wave fails or succeeds is irrelevant, and Google is well aware of that. In the online world, a small step goes a long way. Facebook for example has done its fair-share of habit changing, both online and offline, with the very simple idea of keeping people in touch. Facebook is obviously a happy ending kind-of-story, but even if it wasn’t, the fact that it opened doors to so many other ideas and success stories would remain the same. What Facebook did, and Google is trying to do, is enhance and develop the interactive tools available to users. It is this user-centric approach that makes these online services unique, not the website/service itself. With that bigger picture in mind, Google already has plans to open source Wave, the protocol, as a web communication platform.

I personally think it’s a safe bet that Wave will fly, especially in enterprise. There are almost a thousand possibilities in which it could make professional tasks more efficient, especially in collaboration-heavy fields such as education, journalism, and research. For companies that are just looking for easier technology solutions, the Wave Federation Protocol will allow them to communicate with each other through a public peer-to-peer network facilitated by Google. Features and improved workflow will also not be the only benefits. Governments and big corporations are already starting to decentralize their technology platforms by moving to the cloud (read: save big bucks and face much less downtime).

Google is shooting for the moon, and it will probably make it.

Google Wave is currently limited to Developer’s Preview for testing and bug squashing, with a formal launch not scheduled until next year.

More Hyperlink articles:
It’s Time to Learn How to Surf
It’s Real Time
“Start a Blog” is Not a Social Media Strategy

Did you enjoy this? Be awesome and share: