What is common among Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, and Email? These are conversation tools. How will a conversation on today's web look like? Email used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that's no longer the case today. Google, Mozilla, Salesforce.com, and some others are trying to carve a niche for them in the global conversation platforms.
Google Wave, a personal communication and collaboration tool, was announced by Google (GOOG) at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. A beta version was released on September 30, 2009, with the initial 100,000 users each allowed to invite from twenty to thirty additional users. Mozilla's announcement of raindrop project in October has made Google team to hasten Google Wave launch for the general public. Now the cloud-computing player Salesforce.com (CRM) has announced the launch a platform that will act as a "Facebook for the Enterprise." Salesforce.com claims that it will revolutionize the workplace by leveraging the social-networking revolution. Can Salesforce.com challenge Google Wave? Before answering that question, let's examine Google Wave.
About 100,000 general users are currently testing Google's new Collaboration 2.0 platform, Google Wave. Wave is still in development, and it is too early to definitively judge its capabilities. At this stage, Wave seems unlikely to emerge as the best-available Collaboration 2.0 platform on the market. It will also most likely appeal to consumers, at least initially, based on its current features. Yet Wave should be considered a potential first step in the ubiquitous adoption of Collaboration 2.0 in general, with consumer adoption acting as the impetus for enterprise usage.
Wave has many of the standard components of a Collaboration 2.0 platform. It combines social networking and document and file sharing with email and instant messaging, within a browser-based wiki environment. Users can edit and share various types of rich data and files, as well as communicate with email and instant messaging, within a single, real-time online platform.
However, unlike other 2.0 platforms that have been developed specifically for enterprise use (which I refer to as Enterprise Collaboration 2.0), Wave is currently not suited to project management because it has a many-to-many communication format. This means that it lacks linearity and leads to a chaotic experience for users. Furthermore, it is currently difficult to manage its social networking features adequately, making it unwieldy, and early testers have complained that it is overly complicated to use.
