Google has started testing Google Wave, inviting 100,000 developers and their friends to try out the new service. The big question is whether Google Wave will be successful, and if so, what does it mean for the telecoms industry?
To start with, a bit about what Google Wave is. First announced in May at a developers conference, Google Wave appears in a related video on YouTube initially as very similar to e-mail. One of the developers presents the product as how e-mail would look if it was developed today, and not 40 years ago.
Google Wave is a collaboration tool, meaning it fits perfectly with the idea of Web 2.0. A user sends an e-mail to a group of participants to start a 'wave'. The group members can then continuously add more participants and content to the wave. If someone is writing a message in the wave, the other participants can see in real-time what he is writing and react immediately. While similar to instant messging, the advantage is rather than looking at message saying the other person is typing a response, the user sees immediately what the other person is typing. This real-time element is essential to the service. (For anyone who still wants the option to delete before sending the text, it's also possible to suspend the real-time text.) In addition, a simple drap-and-drop function allows insert to add photos, documents and other content in the wave, adding to the collaborative nature of the service. And that's how it tops a social network.
In addition to real-time, another characteristic is essential for the product to function: it works simply in any web browser. To facilitate use with older versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Google built Chrome Frame, a browser plug-in to faciltate more advanced applications such as Wave.
In short, Google Wave can best be described as real-time social networking. And a mobile variant of that is only a question of time. But can such a fairly complicted product be successful? Within a day some of the 100,000 invites to test the servce were appearing on eBay, but it's not clear whether that's a good or bad sign. Furthermore, Wave will be competing with any number of applications. For example, in the Netherlands, many consumers would find it difficult to consider abandoning MSN Messenger in favour of another platform.
Google has especially worked on the scalability of the product and will test whether the service is stable enough with the first 100,000 users. Furthermore, it's based on open-source code, meaning developers worldwide can come up with feedback and extensions. Ribbit, part of BT Group, already announced plans to develop voice applications for Google Wave.
What this new service makes clear is the huge role of developers in today's telecom world. Even small companies such as the Dutch service providers TNF (a unit of Vodafone) and Solcon have their own team of developers. Vodafone recently announced its own new 'unified communications' platform, Vodafone 360, which was largely developed in-house by an army of 1,000 developers. And of course companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Amazon.com and other providers of over-the-top (OTT) services employ large numbers of developers. A good example is Iliad, an alternative operator on the French broadband market, which operates under the name Free. Iliad is continuously working on new applications to distinguish its services from the competition.
Finally, let's not leave out that Google Wave, if successful, will have huge consequences for global internet traffic. The ease of exchanging photos and documents will affect the quality and redundancy of user connections. The nature of the product also brings back Cisco's prediction earlier this year about the number of "networking hours" in a day. Via active and passive multitasking, these will increase from 36 in 2008 to 48 in 2013.
