The tweets and the blogs are really turning up the heat on Google Wave today. I just think all the hype about getting an invite overshadowed the reality of what Google Wave really is, so a lot of people who somehow did manage to finagle an invite are now using it and are totally underwhelmed.
That's OK. Give them time.
There are a handful of people who seem to really understand the promise that Wave holds. Not surprisingly, it's the people who are doing some kind of group communication right now, and they use a bunch of tools, and they all stink.
This amazing post from Lifehacker does perhaps the best job of explaining the promise of Wave.
It's worth reading the whole thing, because it's not some writer (like me) who is just talking about it. It's a collection of real people who totally understand how Wave might help them, and explain the way that communication is broken for them right now.
For some reason my favorite is from the air traffic controllers at Philadelphia International Airport. They are using a spreadsheet right now to keep track of construction, snow removal efforts, delays and more. It sounds like it kind of works for their needs, but spreadsheets are not and were never meant to be communication tools. Yet here it is being used every day as just that.
With Wave they may be able to work together with airlines, airport officials, and more, and publish it all in a way that's useful for the people who might be most affected by potential delays; and work to minimize them.
And here, because somehow I forgot to embed this last week, is a video that does a great job of explaining not only what Google Wave is, but the lengths to which people will go to get a Wave invite:
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 via Twitter using the button below.
Comments
"Most People Don't "Get" Google Wave, But a Lot Do"
Most people don't get : where the US is on a globe
what a browser is
how to put on their sox
Do like your writings - you seem like a rare early adopter who understands what is wave, actually. I myself work in widely distributed support team, we are trying to keep our heads above this email, IM, wiki and some other issue tracking webapps soup and it sucks. Big time. And wave to me looks like a shed of the light at the end of the tunnel, even when I had no chance to try it by myself... Well if we would ignore the fact that I've set up google's reference server for myself and playing with it a bit :) And that's also is the very key fact which is totally missed by all those "goggle has a potential to replace email?... - nonsense!" reviewers, who are spawning one after another these days. Google HAS the potential to replace email not because it will provide good wave service and awesome web application (it will surely appeal for me and those like me to whom new thing does not has label "complicated", by default), but because it's technology like mail - it's open... <char limit> :)
Google Wave sucks big time. Companies will never adopt Wave for team collaboration, imagine all the private data going into Google's servers. For internet users, this means nothing 'cause all the 'things' google integrates already exist: twitter, facebook, wiki and more...
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