I‘ve heard so many people say now that Google Wave is an epic failure, and I think that it may be time to to stand up in defence of this technology. Because that’s what it is. A technology.
People who criticize Wave often talk about it in terms of a useless community of some kind. And I do agree that, as such, Wave would be unsuccessful, mainly because of two reasons. First, it leaves much of the workflow up to the user. It doesn’t tell you much intuitively about how to use it. Second, it feels closed. It feels like you can’t integrate Wave with Facebook or other services. I would however say that neither of these things are Wave killers, because it’s the wrong way to look at wave.
Wave has advantages in that it enables top end features from several other technologies in one single technology. These benefits are hard to compete with for anybody else since you solve all four quadrants of the time and space table from Mashable’s recent post on the topic.
The critique of Wave is of course highly valid if viewing it as some kind of out of the box community since the original Wave interface lacks a intuitive user experience and is not inherently social. But if you look at Wave as a technology to build on, Wave shines brighter than ever.
Imagine for example the following technological revamps:
- Basecamp rebuilt on Wave
- Full Google Apps integration with Wave
- A TweetDeck-like user experience for Wave
- Shortcodes to send SMSs, Tweets, Emails, or Blog posts straight from Wave.
No, Wave is not an Epic Fail. I think that we’ve only seen the beginning of this raw Wave material that will shape many awesome future applications built on top of it. Criticizing Wave at this stage is like criticizing the physics behind a car for not being a car.
Then again – haven’t we humans done stuff like that always? Didn’t we send Copernicus to house arrest for having the audacity to claim that the earth revolved around the sun?
No. Go Wave. Go innovation. Go brave entrepreneurs who will create the killer app of Wave in a not so distant future.
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It’s nice to see people who understand Google Wave! From my perspective it’s only a preview. It’s what it says in the top left corner. And for me that means also pre-beta. To say it’s one of the years epic failure is so wrong and not true.
Like! I also believe Google Wave is neither a fad nor a failure, but rather a glimpse of the future of collaborative tools.
Thank you for ur post!
I have visited a nice tutorial about google wave here http://freshnewz.co.cc/
I agree, I also think this is just the beginning.
The one failure Google may be guilty of here however is the way they launched Waves. By launching it with invites they built a hype that they couldn’t meet at this stage. A big part of why they couldn’t meet the demands is because at this stage it is a closed community. When they launched gmail through invites people could send e-mail to their friends who didn’t have gmail and still benefit from the positive sides of gmail.
With Google Waves there really aren’t much to do if your friends, co-workers and other acquaintences don’t have it. And in most cases it doesn’t make a very big difference if ONE of your friends have Waves, since it is a community tool. That is where I see the big advantages in Waves from my point of view as a communication theorist.
So I think Waves will be big in the future. It has far too much good opportunities not to be a hit. However, they shouldn’t have launched it by building they hype by cutting they supply (i.e. through invites). They probably wanted to test the beta in a smaller group, but at the same time they created a demand in people to get it, which in this case gave them a minor disadvantage i think. In the short run. In the long run I don’t think people will remember that miscount.
I’m with you on this one. Wave has a lot of potential and I don’t really think we’ll see it at its best until more people are using it.
I find it very useful as a collaborative writing tool and liaising with customers. In the past Basecamp has been my collaboration tool of choice but Wave is much more immediate.
I would like to see Google develop and adapt the interface. At the moment it’s too much like email and as such limits people to thinking about it as an email-like tool.
Lets see what 2010 brings for Wavers.
Google Wave an epic failure? I am a bit surprised to see that too given (as Kent points out) it´s still only in preview.
That said, adding to your list of “technological revamps”, I think it´s worth pointing out that the whole idea behind Wave is as Lars Rasmussen described it at Google I/O several months ago: “We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?”
Since Google have Gmail which is one of the major email services around. The obvious question for me is: Then when and how will you turn Gmail users Wave users? If the whole idea is a reinvention of mail, then why not just do it? Convert email to wave and start with Gmail. I think this is what Google will do too (at least if they believe in the Wave product which I hope they do). When and how will they do it? Wrote a post about this a few months ago btw:
http://tongstromberg.com/2009/09/30/gmail-turns-wave/
You Are Right! Beware of humankind’s understanding and adoption capacity (40 years to adopt email) and of majorities’ opinions especially : )
GO WAVE , GO ENTREPRENEURS, GO INNOVATORS
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