Google Wave Will Be What We Want it to Be

I think a lot of people have already dismissed Google Wave before it has had a real chance to show what it can do for communication, myself included.

Maybe it was because I didn’t fully grasp it, and I think a lot of influential bloggers are on the same boat. Some are saying that its launch was timed as a marketing ploy Google did to dismiss Microsoft’s Bing launch.

The same day Bing launched Google pre-released Wave. They had a conference, demoed the product (that they admitted was not ready for release) and got everyone very excited. This is a classic product marketing move.

The truth is Google Wave is a diamond in the rough. It’s hard to see the diamond when we have all this hype surrounding the way it has been pre-released and how many problems the client has.

Let me say this loud and clear: Google Wave is not what you see in the surface, but a communications protocol.

That’s right, the slowness of the app has nothing to do with Google Wave itself, it’s just that browsers and computers are not well equipped yet to deal with the amount of information it carries. Like high definition television, it has to be used by millions before it can be improved.

I am starting to see glimpses of that diamond as I use it more and more. The main problem will be how long before the general public does.

I have invited a bunch of people to Wave. Some of them are techies. Others the opposite. Most of them don’t get it.

Any new tool will have an adoption phase. A revolutionary tool will take even more (Twitter anyone?).

Mark Essel describes what I felt when another Wave user told me to type “with:public” on the tool’s search box.

It’s like “The Matrix” (see the video below to see a fraction of what I’m talking about). It’s much more than an IRC channel listing like Tyson Key mentions, but like the heartbeat of a thousand geeks worming their way across new ground. You can also tag the search, but most likely you won’t get much activity, as not a lot of people are using the tool yet. But I already see possibilities:

• Enterprise collaboration: There’s been already two or three instances when I wished my team was on Google Wave. I had to forward an email that was already getting long and frustrating. If we were all running Wave, it would’ve been a much more efficient process. Remember that Google can run in any server, private or public.
• Niche groups: I have met and started interacting with people that are outside of my Twitter/FriendFeed circle. They are techies from Venezuela, who have started a Venezuelan Users wave and have started really interesting conversations. This is all thanks to the ability to make waves public and tag them properly.
• Bots and Widgets: By adding the XMPP bot on any wave, I get pings to my Google chat. Nothing groundbreaking, but just a sample of what really creative developers could be doing with these extensions.

The power of Wave can’t possible experienced until all our contacts are in there, so it’s almost like riding a Porsche just one block and doing a review of it. We won’t be able to experience the real power until it’s an ubiquitous tool.

I don’t think Google will replace FriendFeed or Facebook or Twitter. I think of it not as a social tool, but rather of a communications and productivity tool. If we think about GMail, we can certainly attest that Google knows how to do those well.

Photo by Xerones