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James Glick, Media Account Manager, CheezeDMG

When Google Wave was released at Google's I/O Developer’s Conference at the end of May it sparked considerable excitement. Now the novelty factor has worn off it's time to start considering the potential of this revolutionary communication tool.

The application itself is impressive, but the use of its API in allowing the possibility to create bots/extensions is what could really pave the way for a new ’wave‘ of web applications, and even the advent of Web 3.0.

Google Wave is a real-time collaboration tool, where you can experience changes to a conversation, character by character, by multiple users and with added functionality through extensions. It falls into the ‘collaboration tool’ category due to the many uses it offers - from straight communications such as email and instant messaging - to installing the wave on sites like wiki's, forums and blogs, creating content and encouraging interaction. So rather than having a set of emails, threads or instant messages; there will be just one ‘wave’.

A good way of describing how you would interact with these waves would be to imagine you’re sharing a word document with some of your friends simultaneously, where you can edit an itinerary, decision or line-by-line conversation with them - in real time. Doesn't sound too revolutionary does it? Google has put their own spin on it though, by introducing intelligent formatting, real-time translation, and integrating external tools like Google Maps, images, and soon, developer’s own creations. It wasn't so much of a product launch, but rather an API launch so they could educate the developers that will be producing these extensions for when Google Wave is officially released later this year.

With these extensions, users will be able to simultaneously run a 'wave' on a blog/forum/site and see changes made both in the application and the external locations simultaneously. If the take up of Google Wave is as substantial as expected, the way that content is delivered to web pages will be completely changed and with potentially dramatic repercussions elsewhere.

For search marketing, with Google Wave providing updates within a conversation on external sites in real-time, the content will no longer be reflective of the last time it was indexed, thus rendering search results and even text ads irrelevant. If a destination page's content changes, the ad will be less relevant and subsequently affect detrimentally the quality score and CPC price. Advertisers that would be susceptible to this would need to commit to increased levels of budget to ensure they maintain their positions if their quality score does fluctuate.

This would obviously affect certain websites more than others though and for search engines to produce relevant results, they will need to continually update and index sites. To take search to the next level, you would need the results to be switching positions in real time, as sites become more relevant than others.

For website owners, Google Wave could cause a change in the way users view their content - for example, being able to view articles, comment, take part in polls and interact, all through a Google Wave bot without even visiting the site. Google wants Wave to not only be the hub of all their products and communication, but also the hub for experiencing and contributing to content from the rest of the Internet. This could have a grave effect on display advertising, a crucial source of income to the running of many websites - and would prompt a sweeping shift of business models towards subscription models where users pay for content.

Google Wave will prompt a notable change in the way search engines index sites and produce results, simply because they will have no choice. Obviously, currently channels such as forums and wiki’s are changed often, but as Google Wave becomes widespread, search engines will have to think about how to adapt to these constant changes.

With Bing taking a couple of bites out of Google's market share and Twitter indexing updates, search technology over the next year could produce something of a cold war. Google has already started making changes to its search functionality including "search options" and Google Squared, and this will escalate between Yahoo, Google and Microsoft as the full launch of Google Wave approaches later this year. Bing's "decision engine" has woken Google up from a distinctly average innovative few years on its search front.

All of this has ramifications for companies using natural search, since to optimize their “crawlability” on Wave, sites will need updating once a day or even more.

Of course the scale of these changes is dependant upon take up, though anyone who has watched the Google I/O developer’s conference video would be surprised if Google Wave doesn’t become the next focus of online communication and collaboration and have a huge impact upon digital marketing.

Author – James Glick, Media Account Manager, CheezeDMG

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