So the big news this morning is that Google has demo’d a prototype communication and collaboration (C&C) tool called WAVE, which they believe will modernise/revolutionise the way we interact with other people.

Google WAVE, which was first shown to the public at the Google I/O conference in San Fran last night (Sydney Time) is basically an attempt to ditch legacy systems, like email (it’s decades old now) , and build something more in tune with how people are communicating and collaborating these days.

The great news from a local perspective is, of course, that the Wave team is based in Google’s Sydney offices (led by the Rasmussen brothers who basically created Google Maps) so Sydney may very well be at the forefront of the C&C revolution.

—

—-

From the looks and sounds of things (Come on Google - hook me up with a demo, will ya?) it’s a mix of email, groups, IM, File Sharing etc. with a strong focus on the growing trend of real-time communication. The overall goal appears to be to allow free form communication and collaboration (C&C) with the ability to add structure according to context.

If that’s the case, the idea of contextual rather than chronological, or even directory/folder based, structuring of C&C is going to be a massive step forward for the C&C world.

So what does Google plan to do with Wave?

Well, the most obvious focus in the official Wave communication is the fact that they are going to Open Source “the lion’s share” of the technology. The point of this, according to Lars Rasmussen, is to build adoption of the underlying protocols. Essentially, the plan is to build a new C&C platform, accessible from almost anywhere on the web (they’re trying to deportalise C&C as part of Wave, as well) that anyone, competitors or not, can build products and services around.

With that in mind we should be real about what Wave appears to be. This is an attempt by Google to control the direction of C&C for the foreseeable future. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if Wave is as good as they think it will be, but it’s important to keep things in perspective.

Interestingly, Microsoft has also seen the C&C vision and has been promoting Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC&C) as their enterprise-focused communication strategy for the past 6-12 months - so there’s going to be a ding dong battle for this space in the near future.This is especially true when you consider that Wave will be able to be used as both a cloud-based and behind-the-firewall service…can anyone say Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint compete…?

I don’t want to delve too much more into Wave for now, simply because I haven’t had a play with it yet. No doubt there will be a lot more to speak about soon, so keep an eye out for future stories. If you want more info you can check out the official release form Lars Rasmussen, or even the TechCrunch interview with the leads of the Wave team.

In the meantime, a massive well done to the Sydney Google team for having the nuts to try something this ambitious and for getting it this far.