Google Wave – Who owns the wave?

So Google announced Google Wave a few days ago and it’s a very interesting and great re-thinking of email and web-based communication and collaboration in general. In terms of personal use, I think it is great. Additionally, the potential for use in the corporate world is absolutely immense. One of the big barriers to corporate adoption I see is the question “Who owns the wave?”.

What is Google Wave
If you aren’t yet familiar with Google Wave I would suggest doing the following (as I’m not going to give too much in the way of introduction) :

• Firstly, have a read of the Google Wave Guide over at Mashable or the overview at O’Reilly Radar
• Secondly (if you have the time), watch the Google Wave Developer Preview from Google I/O 2009.

Email rethought – A single communication object
If you haven’t worked it out from other reading, the primary purpose of Google Wave is to introduce a single re-usable object for communication that all participants collaborate and contribute to through the life of that piece of communication. This differs significantly from email. Each email is a separate object and any previous context provided in a new email is done by simply duplicating the information from an existing object.

Having a single object for a thread of communication is great for global communication, but I’m sure larger organisations with any kind of security or privacy policy will be wondering where the data will eventually reside. To effectively facilitate the single object model, I would expect the object would need to reside in a publicly accessible location (Admittedly, I have to do a lot more investigation on the Wave protocol to understand their architecture and federation model). I think this is going to make these organisations more than a little uncomfortable.

Is this really a new problem?
In reality, however, email suffers from the same problem and it’s probably even worse. Once you send an email it disappears into the ether and out of your control. At least with a wave it resides on a server (or a group of distributed servers – close geographical servers will absolutely be required to even get close to recreating the speeds shown in the Google IO keynote) and thus could have it’s movements monitored in one way or another.

Summary
Whilst I don’t believe that Google Wave will have a significant impact on the internal communications of corporates in the next couple of years, it should definitely be a mechanism that is used to engage with external customers (as per other social media platforms such as Twitter).

Personally, I really looking forward to using Google Wave when it is released and potentially getting stuck into building some extensions for the platform through the developer API.