Music Ally

Google Wave! It’s The Future! Convergent Communication 3.0! The bleeding zeitgesty edge of real-time innovation! But, er, what exactly IS it, and what potential does it have – if any – for artists, labels and the music industry?

I’ve been puzzling over this since Google Wave was first announced earlier this year. Now it’s launched in beta, with Google having sent out the first 100,000 invites for the service, allowing those people to invite others.

There isn’t much specific information online about Google Wave and music, apart from this fairly brief Hypebot post. However, there are quite a few articles talking about what Google Wave means for brands, which offer ideas that can be translated to the music industry.

With those as the basis (and properly referenced and linked to), I’ve tried to put together a brief Google Wave primer. Read on, and do please post a comment if you have views or ideas on the subject.

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Google has unveiled its Next Big Thing at its I/O conference. It’s called Google Wave, it’s due to launch later this year, and the company describes it as a “real-time communication platform”.

What’s that? Well, Mashable has a handy beginner’s guide, which explains that it’s a mix of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking and project management. Or, to put it another way: Gmail meets Google Talk meets Wikipedia meets Facebook meets Google Docs.

Developers will be able to build their own applications and widgets on top of it, and its features include drag’n'drop file-sharing – which although not the focus, could rile the music industry. Anyway, it seems like something worth getting up to speed with now, before it goes live.