For a guy who writes about Google Wave, this is probably a bad idea... but I think there is so much Google Wave Hype, so many Google Wave scams, that it seems worthwhile to make these points:
1. Bragging rights are overrated.
Imagine you are at a party two years from now. One person talks about how much easier communication has gotten in the office because of Google Wave and some extensions that were specifically made for their industry. The other person says that he had a Google Wave invite back in October of 2009, a year before the first person even heard of it.
Which of these people do you want to be?
2. It's not soup yet.
When the Google Wave team announced that this was a preview version -- that it would have lots of bugs, not work properly, crash often, and have many obvious features not enacted yet because they just haven't gotten to building them yet -- for some reason people chose to ignore that.
Turns out the Google Wave team is honest about their product.
That hasn't stopped one hackneyed reviewer after another from complaining about how Wave has bugs, doesn't always work properly, etc.
The popularity of the invites has brought on this problem. To use a different party analogy, a lot of people just want to get into the party that is hard to get into precisely because it is hard to get into. Once there, of course, they begin complaining about what a dull party it is. (They are right, by the way, but what they don't realize is the party is dull because they are dull people, and everything around them becomes more dull just because of their presence.)
Google's own good work in other areas is its undoing in this matter. We've all come to find searches so fast and so useful, and that all the other tools they release work so reliably and generally intuitively that we think anything with the Google name must also work flawlessly.
Google Wave will get there, but it's not there yet, not by a long shot.
3. It's not going to kill e-mail.
It's going to be awfully hard to kill that beast, even though lots of writers are speculating that Wave could be the e-mail killer.
Look... when radio came out all the pundits of the time speculated that it was the end of newspapers. Same for TV. Same for the 'net. Now a combination of all of those and a global economic head cold have killed some newspapers, there are still hundreds of newspapers in every state and every country around the world.
E-mail will be with us for a long time to come; it's so ingrained in so many of the routines of personal and organizational life that it won't be easy to shake.
That said, the next time you have to send a document to more than one person and ask them to look at it and write you back with any comments, and then you are the one who has to coordinate all the reactions, you'll be wishing you had a different tool. Google Docs certainly gets you closer to a world where tracking documents is easier, but it can still be sloppy.
Google Wave will improve this, and dozens of other kinds of communication where more than two people are involved.
For now, however, email will be especially useful to send notes saying: "Hey, go check the "bla" Wave because I just posted something important!"
4. It's lonely in there.
Where is everyone?
Those using Wave are going through a weird dynamic right now where they are forming new friendships and having conversations with people they really don't know all that well, only because they can only find those people to talk to.
It's like a scene from at least a dozen sci-fi movies I can think of where the majority of regular people are gone/infected/frozen/dead and a rag-tag group of survivors must band together.
You can go and look at some public Waves, but within those there are some ne'er-do-wells, (already!) who are just trying to get you sign up for their Twitter Account/MLM scheme/online scam.
Eventually you'll be able to invite all the friends you want, and by then more of the bugs will be worked out so it won't be so annoying to use Wave every day. That day is not today. It will come in a while, but not yet.
5. Google Wave may flop.
I don't think this will happen, but we all have to admit that it could. Google has tried lots of things that didn't make it, and is still flogging away at the dreadful "knol" and a few others.
You could end up spending a bunch of time to become a Google Wave master, and after a while you'll be like the guy driving around in Pontiac Aztec, telling people how much you really like the maneuverability or whatever.
I wouldn't be writing a regular column about Wave if I thought that was the case, but if you are NOT
- a writer covering new technology, nor
- a developer who might want to build extensions for Wave, nor
- the nerdiest guy on the block who has to be first and you don't mind being the jerk from reason No. 1 above, then...
doesn't it make sense to just wait for a while?
I am playing with Wave every day and reading lots, but I am open to all suggestions about what aspects of Wave to cover. If you have a tip, well, I'm like a waiter: I live on the tips. Contact me on Scott, or in Wave on "scodtt" or via Twitter using the button below. Also, be sure to grab the RSS feed or subscribe to my email using the buttons above so you can get all the very best in Google Wave news and analysis from a non-technical perspective.
Comments
You're absolutely right, Scott. It IS lonely in Google Wave land right now.
Great article.
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