Google Wave – The Ideal Tool for PR Professionals

It’s happening: 100,000 people will receive today invitations from Google to test its new web-communication platform Google Wave.

Invitations will be sent to

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

These 100,000 people, at their own turn, will have the possibility to send a limited number of invitations to their colleagues, friends and families.

Google Wave is not yet ready for prime time, but the pre-launch press already promises a service that will change web-communication as we know it. The users who love Twitter, FriendFeed and other real time aggregators for being able to see what the community is up to as events happen, will love the Wave. Experts describe Google’s product as a real-time streaming communication; email and instant messaging on steroids, and much more. I personally like the real-time streaming communication description the most – although Google Wave is about both collaboration and communication.

“A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

The video previews presented by Google show an amazing product: a platform in which people can communicate and collaborate in real time, being able to work together editing rich media at the same time, share their work, embed waves in sites and much more. The “fun” element is also present: adding live widgets and social gadgets let users play games, solve puzzles, etc.

There are some concerns that the Wave will be too complicated for less savvy Web users, but I think this is just a secondary issue for Google. The “less savvy” is not a Google Wave demographic. The product is addressed to people who are actively involved in online communication, at any level (fun, personal, business, etc).

At this stage is pretty hard to get a Google Wave invite – I for one know that I’d love to get my hands on one. This will be an amazing product for PR professionals to coordinate campaigns in real-time. In our company, for example, we depend on GoToMeeting for conferences. Google Wave will change that: we will be able to hold all our company communications within one platform. Simple, effective, brilliant. Working on documents will become a breeze – no longer needing to send press releases in word format from one to the other, or work collaboratively in Google Docs, or Zoho and having to “save and refresh” a document to see the last edits.

Knowing Google, the preview will be short, and the main product will be rolled out as soon as the main key features of Google Wave will be fully implemented and all the scalability, stability, speed and usability issues that make the interface “quirky” now will be solved. The question is how long do we have to wait? The first Google Wave reviews from people who got invites will probably start rolling out in a few hours.