Science Fiction Becomes Reality with Google Wave

Imagine speaking to a person in another country who only speaks Spanish while you only speak English. Imagine that you each have a translator listening and translating your speech to each other as you are speaking, real time, without waiting for you to finish a sentence or paragraph. Translation you can understand immediately, no awkward pauses or gaffs.

Now imagine that the translators were not people, but invisible robots or implants. The technology of science fiction transformed into reality.

Douglas Adams had something like that in his hit Sci-Fi comedy novels: "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy". It was called a "Babble Fish" and when you put it in your ear it would instantly translate anything anyone said to you into your own language.

Google has achieved this in the form of electronic communication, and thank heaven it doesn't involve inserting a fish into your ear. You type in your language, the recipient receives your message as you are typing it in his language.

The translator is a 'robot' in the Google Wave product, a multi-faceted collaboration tool that achieves communication heights that have never been reached in a single utility before. The translation feature is only one tiny example of what Google Wave can do. Think of the many tools available today for communication: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, email, voicemail, online photo galleries, chat rooms, instant messaging, SharePoint, and the list goes on.

Google Wave has integrated features from all of these communication vessels and provides a simple, intuitive means of collaboration for personal, business, perhaps even top-secret clandestine communication. Developers are busy across the globe writing new APIs, robots, extensions, and other integrations for this amazing new collaboration tool.

I believe that Google Wave is the future of electronic collaboration, and email will soon be a seldom used tool, retiring after a great 40 year run.

Those who adopt Google Wave quickly will have a temporary advantage...once businesses see the benefits and receive assurances that Wave can be a secure form of communication it will spread like wildfire.

Google Wave will be the demise of those massively expensive Microsoft Exchange implementations and upgrades. High-priced corporate instant messaging solutions like SameTime will be a thing of the past, and the crazy proprietary junkware known as SharePoint will be ridiculously expensive and too complicated to bother with by comparison.

Aside from what Google Wave can already do, the possibilities for new capabilities are endless. Extensions and new APIs are being invented by the hour.

CIOs of major corporations take note: if you ignore this application, you are missing the boat. This is the greatest leap in collaboration since the invention of the telephone.

Yes, I am channelling Nastradamus.