A New Platform:
For the Next Generation of Online Collaboration Via Google Wave
Next Agenda is riding the next big wave of innovation in technology circles around greatly enhancing sophisticated collaboration online. Since the early 1990s when email and the web first started, many have yearned for a way to get large numbers of people to productively work together online at anywhere close to the complexity of working in the same room.
Earlier attempts at such collaboration have been scattershot and disconnected. Various tools that picked off one piece or another of collaboration were developed over time. In recent years you could patch together a collaboration experience with different tools. You could discuss ideas in one place, work on a common documents in another, and communicate immediately on yet another. But the entire experience was kludgy and inefficient.
Not now. A new generation of collaborative tools is now emerging from Silicon Valley companies – promising to make as big an impact as social networking media, like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, did in the last big tech wave. Google Wave is the most important of these next generation tools and a harbinger of what’s soon to come.
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Google Wave essentially does three things. One the simplest level, it integrates all those disparate online tools into one clean, seamless online experience. You don’t need to be a nerd or geek to leverage the power of wikis or instant messaging. Any office worker can quickly get oriented and use them effectively.
Google Wave also adds new capabilities that have not been available before. For example, anyone just joining an online discussion or engaging a common document can hit replay, and much like a video, see all the previous developments step by step.
More importantly, Google Wave is simply a foundation or infrastructure that allows others to devise new applications and continue to refine the collaborative process further and further. This works like Apple’s iPhone platform where developers have now created more than 100,000 applications that users can then use for free or buy.
Next Agenda builds our own problem-solving platform off the Google Wave infrastructure. Google granted us early assess to the tools in order to for us to help pioneer this new terrain. They saw that we were bringing together high-capacity, innovative people and were pushing the envelope on what is possible to do together. Google liked what they saw, and now we are one of the few companies working with them at this early stage.
Next Agenda is building early expertise with all aspects of Wave. Everyone in our network gets Wave accounts well in advance of the public release expected in the summer of 2010. A very limited amount of Wave accounts have been granted worldwide so far. We develop our own applications, including the Wave board seen on the front page. With time we hope to develop the Wave Board into a real-time visual overview of all the activity taking place on the Next Agenda Waves and other tools on our website.
Next Agenda is riding the next big wave of innovation in technology circles around greatly enhancing sophisticated collaboration online. Since the early 1990s when email and the web first started, many have yearned for a way to get large numbers of people to productively work together online at anywhere close to the complexity of working in the same room. 
