It may surprise people to know that Near Field Communications technology has been around since before 2004; it’s just taken this long to take hold within the mobile zeitgeist. That’s the year that the NFC Forum founding members gathered together to advance the adoption of the technology—this year, they’ve announced the addition of 32 new members including Google as a much vaunted Principal Member and the ascension of Intel and CSR from Associate Members to Principal Members themselves.

To understand why it’s important that Google has taken this step, let’s look to what the press release from the NFC forum has to say on the matter,

Principal membership is the second-highest level of membership in the NFC Forum, with each Principal member entitled to appoint a voting representative to each of the Technical, Marketing, and Compliance Committees and Working Groups. Principal members may designate individuals to run for positions leading Committees or Working Groups, and they may propose initiatives and contribute to the development of Forum deliverables. As Principal members, organizations may also participate in the NFC Forum testing and certification program using their own in-house test labs.

To a lot of us in the tech industry, it seems like NFC made its supernova debut onto the scene with Google Android’s inclusion. From there it quickly lost its obscure name of “N-Mark” and has pretty much only hit the news as NFC. Since then we’ve seen Google begin implantation in its phones (in the Nexus S), enable it in its OSes, and encourage the generation of apps that make use of the technology. Not too far behind Google, Apple and Microsoft hoisted their sails into the changing technological wind with Apple announcing plans to enter the NFC ecosystem and Microsoft leveraging their partnership with Nokia.

Note that both Microsoft and Nokia are both top-their Sponsor Members of the NFC Forum sitting alongside well-known communications and financial institutions like Broadcom, NTT, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Corporation, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc. Apple as yet is gratuitously missing from the mix—but, as we all know, they’ve got their hands full with the iPad2.

Becoming a Principal Member should position Google to push more standards-based chips into more phones and possibly even spread their wealth around. We’ve already seen a partnership involving NFC emerge between the search giant, MasterCard, and Citigroup that will help forge the last-leg when it comes to enabling the technology at point-of-sale. Once actual vendors start rolling out NFC in cash registers it will encourage a lot more wireless carriers to invest in NFC capable phone development and design because customers will start being able to use it in more places (which are currently few and far between.)

Earlier this month we caught wind of the “wave-and-pay” testing initiative with VeriFone planned for New York and San Francisco. Inhabitants of those cities will be the first to be able to use their Nexus S and other NFC-enabled smartphones to pay for products at cash registers, and Google is footing the bill for the initial roll out of devices to facilitate this.

Mobile-wallets here we come.

Right now, all eyes should be on competition between the Microsoft-Nokia partnership and Google for the Near Field Communication crown. Nokia has been pushing the technology for years, but Google managed to beat them to making it a wireless industry symbol; with the power of Microsoft’s engine-of-innovation and marketing juggernaut behind them they will prove to be a force to be reckoned with. Hopefully this will spur Google, as well as Nokia, to advance NFC adoption quickly. Such technologies do need rapid adoption to become actually entrenched in the industry; otherwise they manifest only as gimmicks that flourish only as fads and are eventually discarded by the quickly-trending smartphone wielding public.