At first (and, OK, for weeks after that), Google Wave is hard to understand. It’s difficult to figure out how to use Wave, and it’s even harder to imagine how it might be truly useful.

Google Wave

At last night’s Central PA New Tech Meetup, I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation about Google’s latest product with the brain trust of techies in the room, along with the meetup’s organizer, John Caddell. My goal was to get a feel from this group of fellow early adopters about what they like/dislike about Wave so far, and about what they see as the future implications of the technology.

Here are my takeaways on the question, Will Google Wave affect the way business is done?

Google Wave will change project management. It’s clear that Wave is superbly suited for small project teams who need to collaborate on projects, often in real-time.

Google Wave will change how we think about documents. Right now the paradigm within business is that a document is a document is a document. An after-action review, a set of product specs, an informal memo, and a legal contract are created, versioned, and stored in similar ways. The current way of thinking about, creating, and storing documents makes sense for things like contracts and records that are meant to become static. But that way of thinking is inadequate for documents about things like best practices, bios and CVs, and marketing research. Wave will prompt business to differentiate between “static documents” and “living documents.”

Google wave is the wiki for the rest of us. Enterprises currently attempt to create “living documents” (and a management/storage system for them) by setting up internal wikis. The problem is, getting a wiki up and running—and more importantly, getting people to actually use it—is difficult at best. Compared to a wiki, Google Wave is fun. Even if Wave is not completely intuitive and simple, it’s more intuitive and simple than a wiki. The impact of Google Wave on knowledge management should not be underestimated.

Google Wave reinvents the message board. Message boards, forums, and BBs have been falling out of favor throughout the past decade. They’re most alive in the tech community, but adoption within other sectors has fallen off. The similarity of a wave to a message board thread is close enough that Google Wave may make a good modern-day replacement for phpBB and other forum software.

Google Wave makes messages more social. Including someone new in a wave is easy and doesn’t require introductions, unlike adding someone to a conversation taking place between multiple people via e-mail. Wave also allows newcomers to the conversation to catch up by watching how the wave evolved over time, using the (really cool) “playback” feature. What’s more, if you find yourself in a wave with a participant you weren’t connected with before, adding them to your contacts (and thus, to your personal network) is a breeze.

What do you think? Are these predictions pie in the sky? Are there other ways you see Wave impacting business processes in the near future?