How Google Wave could work for businesses

Like other social networking tools, Google Wave could be useful for businesses.

Google Wave is a real-time collaboration tool offering rapid media and file sharing and instant messaging. While aimed at a general social network audience, already there’s talk about Wave as a potential rival for Microsoft's Sharepoint Services and collaboration tools used for project managing teams based at multiple locations.

Users can create a composite wave of photos, videos, maps and documents to which others can contribute and respond concurrently in real time and add their own files and content to waves.

Team members, customers or suppliers can join your wave as interested parties and receive notification of updates and even exchange instant messages with you and other members of the wave in real time as with MSN or Yahoo chat messengers. Playback mode even lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said and did what and when – a useful audit trail for managers analysing how projects developed.

How does it work?

Google Wave’s architecture is rather like a cheesecake built from three layers – product, platform and protocol.

The product or application layer is built using HTML 5, the newest version of the internet’s main programming language. It’s HTML 5 that gives Google Wave its offline data storage capacity with document editing and history management that could prove so useful for businesses.

HTML 5 also includes support for new video and multimedia tags which may make plugins like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight a thing of the past. New generation browsers like Google Chrome already support HTML 5 media playback.

The platform layer of Google Wave is built using various open source APIs which allow developers to access Wave functionality to build new automated programs and add-ons, known respectively as robots and gadgets.

Finally, there’s the Google Wave Federation Protocol which hosts waves consisting of files, media and real-time communication on Google’s server and offers support for concurrent edits and the publication of waves on several different websites.

Can Wave be integrated with my business systems?

Business email, blog and wiki integration is likely, along with the emergence of video conferencing tools which exploit Wave’s media support.

However, the extent to which Google Wave could potentially be integrated with existing business systems like customer resource and content management tools is still unclear.

A maps gadget has been built which allows employees to collaborate using Google Maps to plan events such as meetings, and it’s probable that other apps will appear to integrate Wave’s event planning with calendars in programs like Outlook and Lotus Notes.

Google Wave is also likely to become a hotbed of mashup applications using Google Maps to plot data and overlay business statistics. With Wave already offering support for custom html, there will also be scope for customising the look and feel of waves to match your corporate business website and to employ the same CSS stylesheets used to administer your website.

Could Wave potentially be used in CRM?

Google Wave already contains a robot application named Twiliobot which can record and transcribe phone conversations. Twiliobot works by using the Twilio Phone API and some Python and XML code to allow you to dial customer or contact phone numbers simply by clicking on a link.

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