Google Wave – a new communication tool for business?

Lars Rasmussen, Google Software Engineering Manager posted in Google Official blog about the idea of Google Wave. In this article he comes up with some interesting notes:

• Today, we are facing varies of different types of digital communication such as email, sms, chat, videos and conversations versus documents. Why we do have to live with all those things?
• Is there any possibility to design a single communications model that can cover all those features and gradually transform what we currently have in a web today?
• Instead of imitating the non-electronic forms, why not we are able to design a new communications model based on the ability of current networks infrastructure, computer technology, hardware and software?

Google Wave at wave.google.com has been launched to public in October this year. Currently, this site only can be used by limited users who have received the invitation from Google and registered users.

What is Google Wave and how can we take advantage of this technology in our business activities?

In simple words, Google Wave offered a new approach of the current communication tools on the Internet. Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.

Regardless what kind of names you have been familiar with in Internet such as Emails, Chats, Forums, Groups, Blogs, Social Networks, Docs or Web Content etc., Google Wave will treat all of these terms and activities as a Wave. A Wave is a set of activity tasks among users or between users and applications.

For businesses, this new approach will open unlimited possibilities of ideas that can improve the current web based technology and its processes. There are plenty of benefits of 'Wave' model that can be applied in day-to-day business function. Below are some of the Google Wave advantages:

Google Wave is an Open Source:

Google committed that Google Wave is open source, "free" software, as a framework platform for open-source developers to create their own application.

A framework platform allows business to develop the applications that can meet their own business requirement. It can be used in various types of web based applications such as a subset of corporate website, intranet-extranet sites, social networks, online marketing, CRM etc.

Users also have the options whether to install Google Wave in their own web server or allow Google networks to host the application.

Interaction between human and non human things:

In "social networks" media such as FaceBook you may only have a human as your friend or contact. Your friends are represented by their email addresses.

Google Wave allows you to add a non human 'thing', a web services, as your contact /friend, as long as it has its own email address.

Let say you're not sure about your garage door, it might be locked or not. In this case you can add your garage door as one of your contact with the IP address as garage@yourdomain.com.

Then you can send a message such as 'door status please' to your 'door' contact as a new wave in your Google Wave dashboard.

Your garage's contact will reply back to your Wave inbox with a reply message such as 'locked' or 'you forgot to lock me, stupid!'.

Of course you can't send a message 'lock the door, please', since you need a real human to do that job.

From the above scenario, you can get the ideas where there are many possibilities of interaction processes that can be developed in the future for business purposes such as hardware maintenance, stocks, inventory, purchase order etc.

In Google Wave the non-human contact named as Robot.

GWave in Customer Service:

Currently if we have an issue with our service provider we will deal with customer's service staff, account manager or technical support. It's a quite long process dealing with different person and communication via phone calls and emails.

Google Wave can integrate those processes into an integrated interface, Google Voice, Contacts and Robots. It is a real time interaction between wave components, where all participants can follow through the information from any point of communication thread.

SalesForce CRM has started the ideas on how to integrate their existing application into Wave here in this URL: Getting in front of the wave

Finally, at this stage it is too early to predict how far Google Wave model will provide direct benefits in business process. It is still in a trial stage, quite slow and needs lot of improvements before it can be used in the enterprise level. However, at least we have the ideas that the new business process models in the next unified communication era will simplify the traditional processes, become more in-expensive and of course it is promising.