Today, Google announced Google Wave, described as “What email might look like if it were invented today.“ From our perspective, the most exciting part of it is the open XMPP based protocol that Google has defined, and their pledge of an open source reference implementation. Having worked with technologies like Google Gears which is used in Zoho Mail & Writer today, with other services to be added soon, we are really excited about Google Wave. Here is a third party (competitor!) perspective on the technology and how we plan to use it.

Currently, our Zoho Chat message bus works across Zoho services to knit them together in real time. A few examples would serve to illustrate this. Let’s say you are working in Zoho Mail, and a colleague shares a Zoho Writer document with you. You will see a notification in the chat bar in Zoho Mail, and you can choose to open the document right from that notification. When that document opens in Zoho Writer, the chat bus carries the real time editing information back and forth.  Zoho Meeting, of course uses a real time screen sharing system.

In other words, real time communications permeates Zoho services. We plan to embrace the Google Wave protocol to make these communications open and interoperable with any other Wave provider, including Google itself.

How do users benefit?

[check out the Zoho blog for more details]

PS

I’ve been watching the Developers video which goes into more depth and shows more demos as this Google Wave Presentation is given to a group of developers. Google Wave looks awesome with real time features enabling sharing of photos, play, work, and more.

http://wave.google.com/