Google Wave: Finally, Innovation

May 30th, 2009

Watched the Google Wave presentation video, and am intrigued; even excited. Which is surprising, since I’ve been completely unenthused by web services in general for the past year or so.

Lately, I’ve resigned myself to using a combination of Twitter and FriendFeed while avoiding Facebook, but feeling like the overall social networking Web 2.0 whatever space would eventually be handed game, set, and match to Facebook. I’ve seen essentially bupkiss in terms of web services that seemed truly innovative. Lots of iteration (incremental improvements) but nothing really worth writing home about, much less a blog post.

Well, based on the demo alone, Google Wave looks like real, disruptive innovation. Hooray.

What Looks Intriguing

• Better email: Basically, for a long time now, various companies have been trying to pull people off of email and onto social networks, with varying success. All this time, there was a fair argument being made that email itself was the largest social network. One genius idea of Wave is that email and IM don’t need to be separate activities. And come to think of it, neither do RSS readers, applications, blogging, or sharing links and commenting on them. They can all be integrated into one space and just called a “wave,” and the “wave” could be seen as a meme that takes any form depending on what the individuals want to do with it. There’s potential to have just one spot where all this social crap occurs and it doesn’t have to be Facebook.
• Realer real time: You can see other users typing text and interacting with a Wave, and suddenly FriendFeed looks slow. But beyond that, Wave has controls to pause, playback, rewind, and fast forward any changes to a wave. Meanwhile, FriendFeed just has a pause button. Wave is aware that users may get overwhelmed by real time and have given users playback controls to deal with it. So overwhelmed users (raises hand) have the ability to slow down the fire hose and make sense of it all. Users happy. FriendFeed and Twitter have work to do.
• Productivity: Wave looks like a genuine productivity tool. It is ripe with possibilities for people to create subsets of social tools with it — a blogging platform, a social network, a Twitter client.
• A development platform: Wave has two extensions: Robots, that basically act as users and help you — the demo featured a spelling and translation robot — and gadgets, which can be embedded in a wave.
• Roll your own: Organizations can install a Wave on their servers and have the data remain within, a great answer to corporations that don’t want their employees accessing Facebook and Twitter. There is also intent to open source the platform.

Questionable Stuff

• Google apps? Not sure how other Google apps (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader) will hook in to Wave. It would be a coup if one could layer Waves over an existing Gmail account, but more likely there will be yet another account to create meaning a barrier to people ever signing up for this service. And this type of service needs users to make any sense.
• It’s too complicated: Twitter is so simple a chimpanzee can use it. Email is not far behind. There’s a good chance Wave will fly right over the heads of the unwashed masses, and end up like a cool Xerox PARC project that never gains traction. Note other Google projects that haven’t seemed to go anywhere (read a Knol lately?).

Still, I remain intrigued. Through Wave, Google may create an uber social network, a platform where users flock and other web services trip over themselves to be pulled in. This is similar to FriendFeed, but because Wave is open source, has applications, and better real time controls — it has so much more potential.

And lastly — the name “wave” is very appropriate. Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed have all been playing in the “lifestream.” I’ll reserve final judgment until I actually get to play with Wave, but at this point, I’m ready to forget about streams and get to the ocean, where the waves reside.