Do the wave.

The web is rife with reviews about, guides for, and attempts to figure out Google’s newest and kewlest free toy du jour, the open source Wave platform. A quick search on your favorite search engine will yield plenty of info about what it is and how it will change the way you communicate, make you dinner, and shine your shoes. It’s that good, supposedly. So search away and read up if you want, but if you want to know what I think, you can only get that here. And I know you want to know what I think. Cause my opinion is the most awesome…ever.

Thanks to a friend of mine in Oklahoma, I got my invite to try Google’s prerelease implementation of the Wave platform, Google wave. For any of you who aren’t geeky enough to give a crap about what Wave is, you should know that those of us who are geeky enough to give a crap, still have a difficult time wrapping our heads around it. Now that I’ve used it, I think maybe I can sum this up for you: Wave is something completely new. You’ll have a difficult time wrapping your head around it too, because you don’t really have anything else to compare it to. It’s kinda email, but it’s not. It’s kinda IM, but it’s not. It’s kinda wiki-like, but it’s not. It’s kinda a shared document editor (a la Google Docs), but it’s not. It’s something completely different, and completely familiar. It’s all of the above and none of them.

Does that clear it up for you? Google wave is a new communication platform, period. Like email. Or IM. Or wikis. Or Twitter. Wave is like that, but different.

Something that is actually easy to explain is the concept. Google wanted to create a new communication protocol, and I think they accomplished that. Just like email is simply a…thing…and you use other people’s implementations of that, um, thing, so is Wave. Nobody owns what a “document” is, nobody “owns” email…it just is. In 10 years, Wave will exist in the same way. At least in Google’s wildest dreams.

Currently, the open Wave technology hasn’t been released into the wild. It only lives, in infancy stage, in the land of Google. To make another comparison to email, imagine if Google had invented email, and the first version of email was Gmail, before becoming widely available to everyone else to use. So, Google wave is really just the first implementation of the open Wave protocol.

Whew. So far, for an opinion piece, I’ve shared very few opinions. Here’s my take, having messed around with it a bit:

• Umm, c’mon Google…let’s get some more of my peeps on there. Or give me some invites to hand out so that I can actually use it.
• It’s still too early to know if this will be a game changer.
• I’m not necessarily too keen on the “everybody can edit everything” thing. In other words, imagine if you could go through and change an email you sent a couple of weeks ago…but then again, any of your friends could do it too.
• Kinda hard to figure out at first, but then, it gets to be pretty cool and easy to use.
• As the rest of the features begin to roll out, and more and more people start using it, and more and more extensions become available, this thing will probably become pretty powerful.
• Public waves…heck, the public wave directory…a little difficult to follow.
• Unfortunately, Wave may be a little bit too devoid of structure. Then again, it may be too early to tell.
• If Wave turns out to be a game-changer, it’s not going to change any games for years and years.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Anyone else on Wave? Ping me! I’d also love to hear any of your opinions in the comments. Or questions. Cause I have Wave, and I’m cool.

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Comments ( 1 Comment )

Well, I’m not sure if anybody actually reads this blog (maybe I should look at my Google Analytics once in a while), but I’m definitely certain nobody comments…so I’ll comment for myself. Kind of a self-service sort of thing.

I’m not sold on Wave. Like most of Google’s technologies, it’s like it was developed by developers for developers. It doesn’t feel all that user-friendly, it doesn’t appear to follow other usability standards set forth by popular software (a complaint I’ve often had about other tools like Twitter and MediaWiki), and it’s so complex and convoluted that it doesn’t feel like the evolution of anything, it feels like an alien species.

Maybe it’ll take hold, but I’ll bet it’s going to require some maturing and a lot of time.

Dan added these pithy words on Nov 14 09 at 19:14

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