I expressly waited a week to write a post about Google Wave. I knew that if I wrote about it right after seeing the demo presented on the I/O developer’s convention, I was going to be drunk with thoughts of what the future of communication looks like.
But after watching it two days later, further reading and analysis, and explaining what it is to colleagues and non-technical friends, I believe the product could be welcome in certain circles but will be largely ignored by the general population.
Bear in mind that I base this anaylsis on what I’ve seen and read. I haven’t actually tested the product. Am I awaiting eagerly to have it? Yes, absolutely. I think it’s one of the coolest apps I’ve seen in a long time. The main issue for me is that the tool is trying to be everything at once, but it’s not clear why that is an advantage.
Here are some of the pitfalls that I could see become an obstacle for the adoption of the tool.
User Wall-Gardening
As I’ve written in the past, Google has failed when it has tried to make inroads on the social forefront. Google makes great tools, but social platforms has not been its forté. For Google Wave to reach its full potential it should use open user authentication, i.e. allow people from any network (either Twitter, MySpace, Facebook or Yahoo) to become a contact in my Google Wave. From what I’ve read and seen, it looks like you will have to be a Google user to get entrenched on the Wave (but others might correct me). I know that Wave can be installed in a company server, and at that point I’m not sure how authentication would work. I sure hope Wave allows people from any network to participate and not just Google contacts.
When realtime becomes a nuisance
As Twitter has shown, followed by Facebook and FriendFeed, realtime communications is all the rage. It’s where we’re headed. I can handle it, but the majority of people I’ve showed this to get an instant negative reaction to it. At first they think it’s cool, but if you ask them if they would use something like this they usually reply “no, that’s too fast for me.”. Granted, you will be able to stop the “realtime” writing of messages in Google Wave, but then, what is the difference between writing a message there or writing a normal email on Gmail?
Email threading works well as it is, so does instant messaging
I don’t know about you, but the majority of my email threads include only one more person. I rarely use email to discuss something with more than two people, and after seeing the demo, I’m not sure that I want the communication to be all over the place, looking at scattered lines popping up all over my email with no order. Yes, Wave allows you to see a timed progression of the comments, but I could see it becoming hard to follow.
If I want to have a more interactive conversation with a family member or a friend, I hop on to instant messaging. If it’s a total stranger, I create a one-off chat room with tinychat. I wouldn’t want to invite a total stranger to my Google Wave or have a conversation with a co-worker whom I don’t want a closer relationship with in something other than my messenger client.
The Content Silo
It also looks super cool to upload all this content to Google Wave. In the demos we are shown how you can drag and drop photos to the client and see a lightbox-style photo slideshow. But where do the photos live at that point? I know I can embed them using a Wave gadget, but can I further fetch them, export them, manipulate the metadata? And again, what’s the difference (or the benefit) between this and attaching photos in an email?
The same thing goes with the Wiki-style sharing. This information would be trapped in Google’s servers and I would be a little wary that they’re not under our control any more. What if I want to build a Wiki from all the Waves that I have created and shared? Can I get all that information out?
The Bottom Line
I think Google is trying to solve a problem we don’t have in the first place. Google Wave feels like an auto manufacturer that wants to mix a sports car, a family car and pickup truck in one. Each one of them has a specific need and a specific set of benefits. Email, Instant Messaging and Wikis work fine as they are, and mixing them might be something that most people don’t have the need for. I think Google Wave is a pet project that happens to tap into the buzz word of realtime collaboration, but it fails to deliver something that could be actually useful.
Photo Credit: Title: Majestic Surfer Wave Artist: Bruce Burtenshaw
{ 75 comments… read them below or add one }
Google’s Wave Doesn’t Look Like a Tsunami – New blog post on jungleG http://ff.im/-3B6Zf
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Google’s Wave Doesn’t Look Like a Tsunami – Thoughts on social …: By Jorge Escobar at 4 June, 2009, 5:.. http://tinyurl.com/octdjb
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I’m not too sure you know Jorge. When I heard about twitter I thought "why would I need that, I have IM, I have email, I have SMS. There’s no point. But then I started to see the content people were adding and that what was made it for me. Now I’ve found a bunch of people I find interesting and it’s working really well. That’s what I think will happen with Wave, it’ll be what the users add that make it!
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Jorge, I think that you fail to understand a lot of the basic underpinnings of the Wave idea. Yeah, for Google’s implementation of it, some of your questions about where does data live blah blah are valid, but the protocol itself will be open source. For example: Will you be able to sign in using Facebook or whatever service? If a developer decides to make it happen, then yes you will. And judging by the developer reaction to the keynote, there’s probably going to be a dev or two that does make it happen. Where will the data for photos and stuff live? On whatever server that whatever service that decides to implement their own Wave decides it will be (much like photos that you add to an email reside on some level on the servers of your mail provider). The whole point of it being an open protocol is that much like anyone that decides to implement an email server has full access to all the features of email that can be sent back and forth to any other implementation of email, Wave will allow the same participation across any implementation of Wave (they made that quite clear in the keynote). This is much bigger than just Google as you constantly imply in your article. I also disagree with your wrap up point about “a problem we don’t have,” but this response thing is already too long, hehe.
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Jorge, I have to agree with Chieze. First off, the comments about it all residing with Google would be valid if it weren’t for the fact that Google wants to see this be federated not unlike the email that we have today. I think that you’ll see eventually most of the “big names” will run their own wave services (Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc, etc.) As for who controls the identities that access the waves, that will go as things are going now. We’re moving more towards OpenID, and your authentication to the various wave servers will be through those.
You say that Google has failed at their attempts at social media. While this is correct, I think you mistake the Wave for being a social media platform. It is not. The social media platforms will adopt the Wave as the communications standard, leaving “chat” IM, email, forums, and comments like these behind. Why, I’ll bet that even you will replace this commenting system with a wave based one when it becomes available for you to do so.
I’ve seen a lot of people saying that users won;t like the real time aspect of it. I just don’t see that.
1) In Google’s client implementation (as seen in the demo video) you can simply turn off the real time if you want the wave to act more like IM does today
2) we’ve had full duplex phones for as long as I can remember. Those don’t freak anyone out. I don’t see why having that happen in a text environment will
3) You mention the real time sharing of photos. How is this different from an email attachment you ask? Simple, it’s in the now. How long does it take for us to attach an image to an email (wait for upload), send email, receive email, download image and view. Would it not be more user friendly to have that happen nearly instantly?
One of the big things that makes computing, and the communications that happen through it, slow, is all the milliseconds that we spend waiting for the computer to do something. These are all wasted milliseconds, and they add up in a great big hurry. I for one would love to have my communications and computing to happen as I think. We think faster than we talk, and far faster than we type, and there’s no reason to add man-made delay to that time. But since we have added that man made delay, why not reduce that delay as much as possible.
I don’t agree with you that email works well. I much prefer IM, and realtime(ish) chat like FriendFeed and IRC to email, and use it when ever possible.
Going back to user authentication. From what you have seen you’ll have to be a Google user to access the only Wave servers in existence right now. This will change. There are already people developing Wave servers as we speak.
Cross federation authentication will happen in nearly the exact same metho that cross federations XMPP chat sessions happen right now. It’s no problem for us to understand that you could be authenticated on the AIM IM servers and yet still talk to a GTalk user, right? Why would wave be any different? It’s no problem for us to understand that you could be authenticated by your work, or by Google, and yet still send an email to me at Yahoo? Again, the same concepts apply. The fact that it’s real time doesn’t change that.
You ask where does the data live? The wavelets live on EACH server in the federation that has at least one participant in the wave. If a given wavelet has no participants on a given server, it does not appear there. (this was shown in the last 15 minutes of the video demo – the Google/Acme/other federation demo)
Let’s remember as we think about the wave. There are 2 very distinct things we’re talking about: Google’s product called Wave, and waves in general, which need not belong to Google.
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The idea that excited me most during the demo was collaborative editing. As a tech writer who works from home, I’d love to be able to work on a document with my team who is elsewhere–in real time or not. For the offline work, the ability to make changes (and see who made what, added or deleted what) and, just as importantly, to insert comments or annotations (which can be shown or hidden) seems like a solution to many of my problems.
I can’t wait to try it out and see if Wave lives up to its promise.
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love the picture
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I need the features of Google Wave every day. The lack of a need to duplicate things alone is worth it. Then the fact that you can publish sections to a blog, wiki, or any other service you can code to is a bonus. Wave will be awesome, and once people get used to what you can do with it, they’ll laugh and say how quaint old email, wiki, and IM were for office communication and knowledge worker tasks.
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Take Two (my bad) Read @jungleG Jorge Escobar’s take on Why Google Wave Doesn’t Look Like a Tsunami http://tinyurl.com/octdjb
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how can you say email works fine as it is when easily 3/4 of the emails received are spam? and of the remaining that are not, the information is static and except for html views, lifeless? (or worse, virus’d to the hilt).
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The real challenge to adoption is the speed at which other parties can get wave products out to market, and that depends on the speed at which google can a) push through the federation standard, and b) open the source code. For the moment we’re going tohave to be satisfied to develop gadgets and robots and such that operate within Google’s environment. But once they release their code, then we’re going to see a great number of 3rd party wave servers, and then the "mad rush" will start to get them installed into corporations.
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Here’s my take on this, though. If Google wants this to be a service that can be used by the other big guns like Facebook/Yahoo/etc, why are they launching it first and not as a consortium? In the past we’ve seen how slowly these guys have moved just to implement half of the OpenID platform. Do you think they will just open their servers and install something that Google initiated?
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The interesting thing is, that while Google may have (and may always) fail at "social networking" their Wave product is likely what will bring social networking into every desktop in corporate america. (where social networks are today being banned and blocked)
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@Mike, my point is that email works as it is because people understand that it’s sort of a letter they sit down and write. Spam is not a problem, in my mind, as you could argue that spammers will also try to attack Google Wave as well. Besides, Spam is being handled very well by providers (I hardly get Spam email on my Gmail account)
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I agree with xero – It’s all just text and media manipulation… why should I use something that only handles specific types of manipulations when I can use ONE application that will handle any of them depending on my needs at the moment? For instance, at work a lot of conversations via email/IM turn into project requirements which then turn into task lists and bug reports which then turn into documentation… All of that stuff could just be different views of a single wave. There’s no point in keeping them separated… It’s all just data. I think xero’s right in the prediction that in a few years we’ll all look back on having it handled by "unitaskers" and laugh.
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I think that they’re going to be forced by the marketplace. I think that the hype machine is going to push this as hard as it has Twitter, and that alone will force the big player to adopt it. The fact is that consortiums tend not to be fast when developing a product/platform etc. Consortiums seem to work better after the large development has been done, and the work can be handed off to the consortium for long term housekeeping
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The wave is much more resilient against spam because of how it’s stored. It puts the economic onus on the spammer rather than the spammee. This is the opposite of how it works in the email world.
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And I totally agree with Lindsay & xero. This is why I think the wave will in face replace several different forms of communications, and why I think that the big players will actually adopt it. They’ll also adopt it because they won’t have had to do all the development work, and can still reap equal or near equal rewards to those that Google will reap.
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Fundamentaly, what does Google get out of this? The get the pick of the crop of little startups that have various revenue strategies associated with wave products. Google won’t make any real money off the Wave itself. Its a huge investment in the future for them (IMO)
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My only problem with Google Wave: seeing every character/edit someone does in real time is on by default. It’s just a show piece with little to no practical value. Turn it off by default and it will be easier to adopt for most people.
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I just don’t see (specially) Facebook just rolling over and opening their servers to install a Google Wave. As much as I’d like that, Facebook is very keen on keeping their experience under control. I just don’t see them opening to having Waves when they are also racing to be a real time platform.
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Xero: When I describe it to people as "real time ,full duplex multimedia communications tool" They ALL go "ooooo aaaaaa" and want it now. And I’m talking just regular non geeky people.
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Guru: but I don’t think you’re thinking of the same non-techies Xero and I are thinking. We’re thinking Grandmas and Dads and Sales people who don’t even understand what Twitter is. Don’t you think we’re years away from that type of adoption?
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It won’t BE a "Google" wave. It’ll be a Facebook Wave. It will make their transition to a realtime platform that much easier and that much more complete. But mark my words, you’r ecorrect that Facebook isn’t likely to install a "Google" anything to get there. They’ll take the code, and modify it to suit their own needs. Facebook is moving away from their walled garden model, and they’ll want to join the ranks of the public communications providers, but they’re more likely to do that in the wave federation than to open up their email system.
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No. Gramma has talked on a realtime full duplex phone since forever. The non-realtime of email and IM is a far bigger stretch for adoption than the wave is. It’s amazing that they use the communications tools on the net as they are because they AREN’T like the wave.
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@xero – actually I kind of like the real time typing stuff… It reminds me of "talk" back in my BBS days… you could express a lot more emotion through that real-time typing than you can otherwise. If you want to play with it, make a new EtherPad (http://etherpad.com) and get someone to join you on it… I think that’s a taste of what Wave will be like.
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I think most people think like you are Lindsay. I think that the delay is one thing that keeps people from taking social networking and sIM and things seriously and adopting them as fully as we have
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I’m not a fan of watching someone slowly hack out all of their (and my) spelling mistakes, thought pauses, inline research, etc.
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Did you see spelly? That thing corrected spelling in realtime too
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But then again, I’m a letter writer and not a talker. I like to have time to collect my thoughts, flip them around, and try again.
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Did you ever use a BBS back in the day, xero? It felt a lot more personal communicating with people like that than IM does to me.
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And also, I’m predicting text-to-speech robots for the waves to be developed (for the blind etc) but also I’m predicting that VoIP networks will be connected to the things too so that you can have voice communications become part of (and be stored with) the wave
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It sure did Lindsay. That’s what I grew up using
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I also think realtime is falling in line with other buzzwords like AJAX or web 2.0. People will all be running like ADHD headless chickens trying to make sense of all these Waves happening at the same time. With email *I* control the timing.
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The only BBS I used was essentially a forum. You typed it up, then posted it. I like the interaction of real-time chats (like IRC) and IM, but am satisfied seeing the "x is typing a message.." message as opposed to the actual characters
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I’m satisfied, in that it works ok enough to get the job done, but there are lots of times that I would like to have real time. (and occasions that I would not! – and the Google wave product -client certainly accounted for that desire)
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I also don’t like at all (from the demo) that you can go and edit *any* part of the message; it looked like total chaos to me…
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I guess I’m nostalgic because I had a lot of friends that I kept in touch with using "talk" on BBSes, including a couple of boyfriends and my husband. But it was more like a phone conversation (which was way more expensive back then) to do the RT typing. A lot more personal, and less annoying when you wait 20 minutes for someone to perfect that sentence and press the enter key.
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You can edit any part of a wiki, but that doesn’t make it chaos. Besides, you can always set conventions for edits, just like people do with blog posts and news articles.
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@xero but you don’t see edits on the wiki on real time. While one person edits, the document is locked.
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@Jorge – you don’t HAVE to participate in every wave as it’s happening… you can let them queue up just like email does. Wave just gives you the option of being able to communicate in RT.
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There will also become ways to prevent edits on any parts of the wave. Remember, a lot of the eventual model of the real platform is being left up to outside developers. I can already imagine access control robots that determine which parts of the wave (or wavelets) that a given person can edit, revert etc. It won’t be any more chaotic than a wiki, and in fact is likely to be less so because of the potential for real time automated access control
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I’m thinking the button to toggle realtime will need to be a prominent feature in every wave app.
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It looks like a lot of power will be given to developers, which is good on one side. But look at what happened with Facebook platform apps — a lot of junk out there
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Sure, and you’ll be able to have a wave filled with crap like Facebook quizzes. Or, you could have a wave that isn’t filled with that. And in a publicly accessible wave, you might want a robot gatekeeper that tosses stuff like those quizzes out (I hate facebook quizzes BTW! ) ;)
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regarding an earlier point, I personally liked real time typing. It was one of the few things about ICQ that I really loved. It felt much more natural, like I was actually having a conversation. You could watch them form their sentence and figure out what you were going to say before they finished, kind of like a real voice conversation.
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realtime, full duplex is the way we normally converse. to do so as we are right now is somewhat unnatural
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to say that would be unbridled chaos is not unlike saying that a conversation between 5-7 people would be chaos. Sometimes it is, but more often than not, "rules of the road" meaning common turn-taking conventions spring up organically and naturally (or sometimes not so naturally). We’re already wired to converse in full-duplex, real-time
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yeah, what Rob said.
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I think the notion of chaos comes in the revising what others have written. And I think everyone is aware from the experience of things like wikipedia that there will need to be additional controls able to be put into a wave.
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