I finally watched the Google Wave presentation (below) the other day. I've been doing a lot a fair bit of reading about it and have decided to develop expertise in it with the goal of adding it to my consulting practice. Developers have already started working with the open standards of its XMPP-based protocol and the speculation is that there will be Wave plugins for OpenFire (which is what I currently run) before very long.

I think that pretty much only Google could have developed this - Andy Ihnakto summed it up nicely when he noted:

"Microsoft could have thought of it. But they’d have argued internally about ways to monetize it. Apple could certainly have thought of it. But then they’d have argued internally about the need to keep the technology proprietary and to control and limit everything, including the future of the standard and the scope of what people are allowed to do with it.

Both companies would have ruined it. Google seems to be doing everything right. They’re defining Wave, but then they’re more or less letting go of it."