Google Catches a Reeelly Big Wave

I gave top billing yesterday to our news report on the new Wave application from Google Inc. (GOOG) because I think it represents a huge breakthrough – indeed for once this is a product announcement that, if anything, carries more significance than the company is giving it.

Briefly, Wave is an online platform that incorporates multiple types of real-time communication including e-mail and instant messaging, rich collaboration capabilities for documents, images, and graphics, seamless Web publishing functions, software widgets, and so on. It’s a Web container that can provide an envelope for all the material, Web pages and messages relevant to a group, project, or topic. In the announcement Thursday, Google did not mention voice communications, but it’s obvious that developers, using the open API that the company is releasing, will add VoIP functions quickly.

This is not a novel idea. Several start-ups, including Twine, have tried to create similar all-in-one Web services, but they don’t have the full communications capability of Wave. And of course those companies lack Google’s reach and resources. Through its history, Google’s knack has not been for creating brand new technologies; its genius lies in re-packaging – assembling singular tools into powerful, Web-based, free applications.

Grasping for a suitable comparison here, I think Wave, and Wave-like successors, will be as big an advance as click-to-call Web voice service, Twitter, or any of the other Web 2.0 communications modes that have sprung up, and gathered huge user bases, in the last few years. In fact, I’d argue that it’s almost as big a deal as e-mail itself.

That’s because it’s unified yet multivalent – more so than many of the so-called “unified communications” platforms that have been released by vendors to date. It collects various communications and collaboration modes, including social networking sites, into a single, universal Web interface. The possibilities springing from that assembly are going to be much more powerful than we can presently foresee.

“Google Wave is very open and extensible, wrote Lars Rasmussen, who along with his brother Jens and a handful of other Australia-based Googlers created Wave, in his blog entry announcing the new offering, “and we're inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch.”

Think of a few example use cases for Wave. It’s a great opportunity for telecom carriers, for instance, to improve their famously awful customer service. What if all of your account information, service history, plan updates, and communications with your provider were stored and instantly accessible via the Web, from any device. You could communicate with an agent via your preferred method of communication – voice, text message, e-mail – and be guaranteed a response within a certain amount of time. You and the agent are looking at the same screen, so there’s no but-I-said-and-you-told-me nonsense going on. How would that improve your view of your service provider?

Many companies, such as Voxeo, are providing companies with online communication tools to improve customer experience while reducing the cost of providing service. Wave can unify those disparate tools into a single Web interface as well as provide a single repository and reference point to make the relationship persistent and seamless.

Other business-related, customer-facing examples are easy to come up with – in health care, for instance, and financial services. Security will be paramount, but no tougher than in online banking, the adoption of which is growing rapidly as people get more comfortable accessing personal financial information online.

The opportunities for personal and professional collaboration are even more extensive. What if you had a Wave for each of your college classes? What if a single Wave encompassed all of your wedding and honeymoon plans? What if environmental groups created a Wave, tracking emissions, utility actions and responses, legal challenges, independent studies and citizen interaction, for every coal-fired power plant, in the land?

For my own work, Wave will be the perfect envelope for everything related to a story, company, or beat area I’m working on. Right now my communications and reporting relating to a feature story reside in many forms: e-mail, voice messages, Word documents, the manila folder on my desk, images saved to my hard drive, and so on. Because I’m by nature disorganized, I spend a fair amount of time hunting for e-mail exchanges on a story from a month ago. Using a Wave or Wave-like application to assemble all that material and have a unified chronological record of my reporting will make me, oh, at least 30 percent more productive.

It’s interesting that the same week Google unveiled Wave, Microsoft took the wraps off its renamed-and-rejiggered search engine, now called Bing. Forever in catch-up mode, Microsoft is trying to carve out a slice of Google’s core business while Google is surging forward into other Web applications. As search revenues begin to flatten, Google has been searching for its next big thing. In Wave, and the applications that will begin soon to flower from it, the company has found it.