A Belated Take on Google Wave

Google Wave was announced at the Google IO developers' conference in late May 2009.

Quick Summary:

SaaS team workspace.
To give you a general idea, think of a souped-up/Web 2.0 Wiki or bulletin board. My colleague Steve Kille aptly called it a "bulletin board on steroids" under the hood.
Currently in an early state of development.
Google wants to get developers to integrate with Google Wave. This presentation was to encourage them to start writing Wave applications.
Expect general availability in perhaps mid-2010. As noted, this is still early-stages code.
Main features currently:
- Post messages and responses to them--build extensive conversations.
- People can concurrently work on documents.
- Send instant messages.
- Post photos and videos.
- Built-in access controls.
Highly interactive.
Support for mobile clients, with more limited user interfaces, is anticipated.
There's a very nice ability to see how conversations have evolved, step by step.
Works with external workflows.

Application Platform:

Many third-party integrated applications are anticipated.
Google wants Wave to be open and interoperable. To this end, it will:
- Publish a rich set of protocols and APIs.
- Generally make it easy for third parties to write their own Wave servers and clients.
- Make Google's Wave implementation available as open source software.

You can see the main presentation here. It runs for 80 minutes; it's worthwhile if you're interested in SharePoint/teamspace style collaboration.

Comments:

Wave has big potential to provide shared workspaces.
Google presents Google Wave as a more modern alternative to email. It's an exciting and attractive technology, but one that I think is more of an alternative to SharePoint and team workspaces in general.
It has some very important advantages over SharePoint, some of which are its openness and user- and developer-friendliness.
The ability to concurrently edit live documents (rather than the traditional ECM approach of checkin/checkout) is very attractive.
It appears relatively easy to build third-party, tightly integrated applications.
Several extremely attractive applications were demonstrated, including:
- An intelligent context-sensitive spell checker. For example, it can choose between the correct versions of "been" and "bean"; or change "Icland" to "Iceland" or "island" depending on what's appropriate.
- A very nice on-the-fly language translator. The demo showed English/French; 40 languages are supported in all.
Notably, it currently lacks group calendaring. Presumably this can be fixed before too long.
Notably, it currently lacks good support for the posting of email items. That's a harder problem, as SharePoint's poor email system illustrates.
Emails will be important elements of Wave spaces. Google should show natural and easy ways of posting and using them.
There are various types of access controls. It's unclear at this point how well they will serve corporate needs.