posted by: Mark Cortner
The future of real-time communications and the cloud took an interesting twist recently when Google showcased a new communication and collaboration tool: Google Wave. Google Wave is a browser-based application that creates a shared online desktop where multiple users can interact and collaborate. As described by its inventors, Google Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.
The base applications embedded within Wave include email and instant messaging; though essentially these applications are now unified together and become a conversation in the cloud as opposed to messages sent from one place to another. The conversation or “wave” becomes a shared communication space with email, instant messaging, and social networking elements. Furthermore, a wave may consist of a full, integrated collaborative experience that includes rich document editing and sharing and the ability to save and store any “Wave” resulting from their interaction to the Web.
Interestingly, the questions that the inventors of Google Wave started with are very similar to those connected with the topic of unified communications (UC):
• “Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication – email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?”
• “Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today in one single continuum?”
• “What if we tried designed a communications system that took advantage of computers current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?”
The parallels to UC are very close; the concepts of breaking down silos of communication to an integrated or unified experience, transitioning from single-purpose infrastructure to multi-application infrastructure, and adapting user experience to advanced in computing and networking technologies. Google Wave diminishes the role of the computer desktop in the future of computing … and could impact the future role of unified desktop clients and cloud-based services for UC!
