Dan Herbert's

Google recently announced their newest endeavor, Google Wave.

Google Wave is an open-source collaboration tool that combines wiki software, real time document editing, email/IM, and a few other online social networking niceties. At first I brushed it aside as something I would flop and fail like a lot of Google’s other social experiments. This seems to be the opinion of a lot of other people, including the creator of StackOverflow.com, Jeff Atwood who’s twitter comment about Google Wave actually made ZDNET’s news.

I shared the same feelings toward Google Wave at first, however after (perhaps) drinking too much of the Google Kool-aid, I’ve become convinced that this may be one of the killer apps in Google’s arsenal. The key is how it can be adopted by business, as well as regular people. Consider the following:

• Completely open source. Anyone can set up their own Google Wave servers, so businesses can feel free to use it internally with no security concerns.
• Communication tools. Businesses can use this to replace an Exchange server. I doubt anyone would actually replace exchange, but companies looking for something new  or companies that don’t have anything yet could definitely be convinced with this feature. I’m a huge Gmail fanboy because of how useful Gmail makes it to search, organize, read, and write emails. If this carries over well enough to Google Wave, this is a key feature.
• Wiki/document collaboration. Having documentation that can be updated in real time for any employee to see right away is a totally awesome tool! Wikis have been proven to be useful, so integrated with other packages, this is all the more enticing.
• Extensions. Maybe not a killer feature initially, but this is big. Much like extensions for Firefox, I predict this will be the piece that makes Google Wave truly popular. If Google Wave doesn’t offer something out-of-the-box, then it can be created as an extension so that there is nothing that you can’t do with it.

I’m waiting for more to be released before I’ll say it’s going to be a success for sure, however from what I’ve seen, this could be big. Google already provides a lot of tools and services for businesses. Soon they could be the next Microsoft, only you know… without the evil. Even though I’ve got to admit, Microsoft really seems to be trying lately.

I think Google Wave can succed with web companies that can use the (open) source to provide customized business collaboration solutions that they can produce very quickly since the code is already more or less complete. Since the solution would be open source, there would be commonalities among any company providing a customized Google Wave offering, spreading the brand, market, and mindshare of the product.