Google Wave App Store and its potential
October 31, 2009 by Milo Riano
Filed under Computers
I have been working on digital collaboration for the last five years and I would continue on working on this field for the years to come. The main technology or platform I use is Microsoft SharePoint which is an enterprise class platform for developing applications across portals & collaboration, documents library, business process and workflows, etc.
The digital collaboration space is growing and the enterprise keeps on implementing and improving their collaboration capability across the whole organization. Google knows this as such they have released Google Wave technology to be able to complete in a vertical market. I have signed up for their user invitation weeks back but still wasn’t able to get an invite since I was too late on doing so.
Even if Google Wave is not yet open for everyone, the technology is progressing rapidly and Google has announced during the London meeting that the Google Wave would be opening an app store similar to what Apple has done. This move shows the long term commitment of the search giant on this technology which they seem to roll-out to the consumer market first before pushing it to the enterprise. I think the move of Google Wave to the consumer market is aimed to help the technology grow and mature before they go full speed ahead on competing with enterprise collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint.
Google Wave is an interesting technology because aside from the usual collaborative functions it has, Google promises a real-time collaboration that gets updated as the user makes a keystroke instead of the usual submission of items, going through a workflow and approval process until the time the other user from the other end sees your thoughts.
The search giant also plans to create an extension gallery for Google Wave which includes hooks that invoke actions like opening new wave or launching shortcuts, merging waves, deployment on networks, etc.
As of the latest updates, third party developers have already developed applications in teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and multiplayer games.
I think the Google wave has a lot of potential and in time it would be a cheap alternative application for implementing productive digital collaboration across organizations.
Have you been given an invite for Google wave? What are your initial thoughts?
Image from Google Wave.
