Social Media B2B

Google Wave.

What is Google Wave?

According to Google, the Wave project was started by their team in Australia. The team wanted to figure out what e-mail would look like if it were designed today, instead of 40 years ago. I have been using Wave for about a day and can offer a brief explanation of it.

Google Wave combines the real-time collaboration of wiki’s with e-mail messaging functionality, but is bolstered by the ability to easily add web-based applications. The other decided advantage of Wave is that messages or Waves as they are called, can be either public or private.

Google Wave and B2B Companies

Google Wave is still very early in development and adoption, but to some implications for B2B organizations are already apparent.

1. Collaboration – When it comes to Google Wave, collaboration is the 500 pound gorilla in the room. It is the reason Wave was developed. Wave fixes many of the problems that e-mail has with collaboration: lack of real-time communications, lack of a centralized message storage, and the lack of being able to live outside of the inbox. B2B organizations, whether they like it or not, will have to make choices in the next several years about this type of collaboration. It might be with Wave or another solution that is developed.

2. Further Scaling Engagement – A major challenge today for B2B organizations is applying resources to engage and create content on the social web. With Wave’s ability to add any web-based application, it has the opportunity to help combine social data from multiple sources into one dashboard to aid in reducing the time needed to share and connect with communities across the web.

3. Live Blogging - At a tactical level, Google Wave seems like the ideal tool for live blogging. Wave allows you to embed any message anywhere on the web. Meaning if your organization were holding an announcement at a trade show, you could have multiple members of your team blogging through Wave and have instant updates to media and stakeholders. Wave could also facilitate blog writing and collaboration, allowing members of teams from around the world to collaborate easily together, to better tell the story of their work.

The Current Reality of Google Wave
In my thoughts above I used the word “could” a lot. This is because Google Wave is so incredibly early in its development. It is very buggy still and has a very limited user-base as well, as few available extensions. However, I do encourage you to try it out for yourself as they open the service to more and more users.

Additionally, the completeness of the software aside, individuals and organizations are going to have many issues with Wave. It’s real-time collaboration functionality will likely seem like information overload. It is also likely that many management teams will think of it as a productivity killer, because it is so much more open and flexible than e-mail.

I am most curious to find out, when they can get the service improved enough to open it to the public. My thought right now is that release is several years away. Also, with mobile becoming a major source of online usage, how will an application like this scale to mobile devices, because e-mail has been able to do this well.

The Bottom Line
No one knows the future implications of Google Wave for your business, however it is likely years away. Intelligent organizations will monitor Wave development and continue to test it for themselves to ensure they are ready if application and opportunity meet.

For more information you can checkout this video on Wave:

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