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.
Similar Posts:
- Wave for iPhone and Chrome for OSX Awakens My Engineering Heart
- Google Wave – First Impressions
- Project Management in Google Wave
- Google Amazing Wave Keeps Me Awake at Night
- Google’s New Move to Kill Facebook
