If you’ve been keeping up with latest Google news, you’ll know that Google Wave is the latest and greatest thing. Or so they claim. After spending a few days playing around with Wave I’ve come to a rather disappointing conclusion. Unless you’re a developer, Wave will be useless.
First off, let me highlight what Google Wave provides
- Real time collaboration, and I mean real time – people can see as you type letter by letter.
- A new way to organize your email
- A convergence of both traditional email and instant messaging
As a developer and a computer geek I’m incredibly excited by this. Not only is it something new and fancy, but it could potentially replace existing email and IM systems and provide a platform for developers to integrate these features into their own websites. That’s amazing right?!
Wrong.
Google Wave undermines certain benefits that traditional email comes with. I never thought about the implications of real-time email until I was trying to write an email to a client and I realized that at numerous times I just stopped and re-read what I was writing, and even went back and changed certain sections of it. I realized that if my client could see what I was typing as I was typing it, they might get a little impatient and call me just to find out what I was talking about quickly. However, my writing took place over several days. And that is the benefit of email. You have the ability to refine your response over any number of days before sending it, and once you sent it you can sit back and relax knowing that your client received an email with exactly the tone that you were trying to imply.
Google wave even claims it will be a good way to IM with multiple people, but that isn’t the case. As with emails, instant messaging provides you with a certain set of tools that Google Wave can not provide. Things like statuses (which are implemented somewhat vaguely in Wave), emoticons, and even the ability to write out your message and spell check it before sending it are built into IM clients. By providing people direct access to your thought process as you compose your messages, Google strips away a necessary barrier that these clients require to be successful. A friend once asked me how I cope with being so connected. I read hundreds of feeds a day, respond to numerous emails, keep up with contacts over my Blackberry and even make use of Friendfeed and Twitter when necessary. For an average user that alone is too much. I can’t imagine how I would be able to cope with all of it if I could watch people writing their content in real time.
As a collaboration tool however, Google Wave will serve its purpose. In a corporate setting, working with numerous people on documents is something that occurs fairly frequently, and the ability to open a single copy and edit it (with revisions saved) is a huge bonus. In that respect, I think Google definitely hit the nail on the head.
But what they provide to developers is much bigger than what they provide to users. The ability to access these real-time components and integrate them into their own web applications is something that developers everywhere are waiting to be able to do. Imagine utilizing Google Wave to write your own web-based editor, ala Bespin, but with collaboration and versioning built right in to it. Imagine being able to instantly set up a collaboration between other bloggers to work on a common post.
To developers Google Wave represents the future of the web. It represents the future of JavaScript as it finally becomes welcomed by developers. It forces browsers to push their JS engines to perform faster while lowering their system resources at the same time. To regular users? Google Wave is useless.
If you are interested in Google Wave, I have about 10 invites left. Please leave a comment with your name and the email address you would like me to send it to. The first 10 comments left will get invites.
