The recent announcement of Google Wave reinforces my assumptions that the newly created Social Software industry, its hundreds of new emerging start-ups and the arrival of new major players will still create lots of noisiness during the next months.

The good news is that Google is trying to do it from an open source manner. Google aims to reinvent a new mail 2.0 protocol empowered with instant messaging features (Google Wave is based on XMPP protocol used by the open source Cisco Jabber IM software) and a kind of peer to peer federation approach in mind (anyone can build its own Wave server and integrate with other “waves/wavelets”).

While the recent announcements of Google is probably not a good news for lots of small and mainly SaaS based Social software providers, it certainly create new opportunities for next generation of horizontal content platforms and generic social content applications.

Old generation of hosted forums, chats, web mails or wikis will probably get hard time to fight front to front with the power of the Google team and its impressive cloud computing offering. Same is true with all the social software vendors which are trying to leverage “another-proprietary-content-silo” kind of approach. I already mentioned this point in another blog entry.

However there are tremendous new opportunities for:

1) A new generation of what I call the horizontal CESA Platform (Content Enabled Social Application Platform) which is a derivative of the Gartner term CEVA (read more about it here)

2) New pluggable and standardized CESApps

With the introduction of Google Wave we can easily foresee that content producers (Editors, UGC content, Knowledge workers,…) will look for solutions which will allow them to enter and edit the same content from all the applications they are using. So in case of a “wave” you may want to edit it from the main hosted Google Wave page, from your blog entry within your WCM or from your old-fashioned mail client. This is indeed already the case with this posterous blogging system as I am posting my entry from my Gmail account for instance or just create a new webclipplet with an optional browser plug-in. Content interoperability is rapidly becoming a reality. We can certainly expect a similar announcement of Microsoft in the next couple of month to offer to developer a kind of mini-embeddable MS Word mashup already connected to Sharepoint 2010 and to MSEchange: who knows?

The negative and pervasive effect is that this is now leading to a multiplication of proprietary API (Facebook API, Twitter API, SlideShare API, Social XYV API…) and of user accounts (could you remember how many new user logins you created for the last 12 months?). And usually such a situation does not long forever. End-users are getting more and more nervous about the multiplication of their accounts and by the lack of content interoperability among all these applications. Developers are getting frustrated by the dozens of similar “plugs” to develop and maintain on top of each of these platforms.

So the good news with Google Wave is about the new Google Wave Federation Protocol. Combined with other initiatives (e.g: JCR, CMIS; OpenID; OpenSocial; Gadgets and Widgets,…) it becomes more and more possible to develop portable, reusable, standardized, scalable, content interoperable, SSO-ready and even now federated social applications.

The learning curve for new social content applications developers is however still too high. Reading and understanding all the different specifications, their pros and cons and how they can be combined (or not) all together rather than just being able to rapidly get into some coding experiments is still far from being perfect.

This is where the new CESA Platform should step in. First of all not all the customers want to host their data online or on Google servers. Secondly some want to develop their own proprietary social applications (e.g: for their own intranet purpose). Finally they also want ways to leverage their existing content infrastructure (in term of backup, system administration, content reuse,…).

So I think we will probably rapidly see some kind of “open source CESA framework assembly” popping here or there. Similar to previous old fashioned Web Application Frameworks (do you remember Struts or Turbine?) these new generation of social-ready frameworks will enable developers to rapidly kick into the world of standardized social applications development.

The Apache Foundation looks like ideally positioned to offer such a new CESA jump-in experience. A development package combining Apache Jackrabbit, Sling, Felix, Shindig, Chemistry and perhaps a new “Wave compliant server” (or the RI of Google Wave) could rapidly let new social developers get all the bells and whistles they might think about.

And what is more interestingly is that all Content Management Vendors from WCM system such as Jahia to ECM or to Social Networks will finally be able to leverage such “micro-social apps” and offer their respective value added.

Perhaps the promises of the Portlet API (easily develop reusable and portable apps) will become true with this new generation of CESApps.